{"id":11685,"date":"2022-09-23T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-23T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/?p=11685"},"modified":"2021-12-01T20:32:48","modified_gmt":"2021-12-02T04:32:48","slug":"open-source-chip-design-lowering-the-cost-but-chip-production-remains-expensive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/open-source-chip-design-lowering-the-cost-but-chip-production-remains-expensive\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Source Chip Design: Lowering the Cost, but Chip Production Remains Expensive"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The recent history of computer chips has seen the market dominated by very large market players that have invested large amounts of cash to produce ultra-miniature and highly complex semiconductors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those industry players aren’t expected to change much in the near term, but the market and model for creating and using chips is changing. Increasingly it is possible for non-elite chip manufacturing companies to develop customized chips for specialized applications<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mike Dolan<\/a>, the Linux Foundation’s vice president, said that<\/a> “open collaboration has repeatedly proven to help industries accelerate time to market, achieve long-term maintainability, and create de facto standards. The same collaboration model applies to the hardware in a system, just as it does to software components.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RISC-V is an Open Source project for CPU design. The architecture was originally developed at UC Berkeley and ultimately turned over to the public domain as an Open Source design. It offers a clean architecture and a low-cost point for entry into CPU design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As businesses look for ways to differentiate themselves and to create applications with hardware tuned specifically to their use case, open source may provide them an alternative to mass-produced generic semiconductor chips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, while there are similarities, hardware and software have distinct differences and costs. Aaron Sullivan<\/a>, engineer at Meta\/Facebook, said that<\/a> “with open-source software we have compilers and fairly good management tools for source code. For open-source hardware, we also need fabs. They are expensive and not nearly as plentiful or distributable. They require a lot of expertise to run and develop. That is a critical difference in the rate in which the community can mature.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bipul Talukdar<\/a>, Director of Applications Engineering at SmartDV, wrote that<\/a> “chip design verification is important to remove risk by uncovering issues that would result in a manufactured chip that does not perform to specification or perhaps not even work at all. Verification consumes a majority of the project development schedule. Estimates range from 60% to 80% of a project\u2019s resources are budgeted for verification to ensure success. The risk of a failed design can be expensive when considering longer time to market, resource costs and costs associated with respins. A respin on a complex chip being manufactured in an advanced process technology can be more expensive than the investment in tools and IP used to create the chip design itself.”<\/p>\n

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The recent history of computer chips has seen the market dominated by very large market players that have invested large amounts of cash to produce ultra-miniature and highly complex semiconductors. Those industry players aren’t expected to change much in the…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more ›<\/a><\/div>\n

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