Hi
And how is that? To know more, attend below talk at 9:30pm IST
5-years back, if you had to build your own free chip, that would have been at-least $1M. Why? 3-major costs - (open-source) design, (open-source) EDA tools and (open-source) PDK's. Today, those brackets are open(-source) and this gives a hobbyists at home to build, verify and tape-out his/her own chip.
You see, that's a major difference between licensed and open-source. For licensed, though its structured, the amount of support is limited within boundaries, so even if you want to help some one, you can't. Whereas, in open-source, everyone and anyone from any part of the world can help and no-one will sue him/her
A classic example was with one of our interns, who was struggling to place a multi-height analog mux inside a chip using open-source EDA tools and sky130 open-source PDK's. All she had to do is, post her queries on slack channel, and guess what, literally everyone around every corner of the world who are present in slack channel, jumped in to help, and she was able to do an mixed-signal SoC place/route in just 36hours (which includes
learning open-source EDA, tool setup, pdk setup, issues resolving, and finally layout which is DRC clean). Here's the snippet of her layout
Mohamed from efabless is going to give some more classic examples from his experiments (and some of VSD experiments, if time permits him, else wait for our next blog).
So better don't miss it. All the best and happy learning
