In the era of "everyone is a developer, and every family is a technology company," not only has the threshold for programming been lowered, but even one can even "play" by making chips with their fingers.
On June 1st, the Google Hardware team launched a new developer-oriented website: google silicon. At first glance, this website looks unremarkable, but in fact, it has a hidden mystery. When you open the website, you will see "Build your own silicon," which means that you can directly build your own chips.
For Google, which is at the forefront of technology, has been helping small open-source projects with chip research and development. Among them, in November 2020, in order to better promote chip manufacturing, Google cooperated with the foundry SkyWater Technology and sponsored the Open MPW Shuttle Program, an open-source chip tape-out project, to provide a completely open-source process design kit (PDK).
Based on the Open MPW Shuttle Program, anyone can submit an open-source integrated circuit design, and Google will manufacture chips for it for free while leveraging open-source PDK and other open-source EDA tools. The current Open MPW Shuttle Program has received submissions from Microwatt OpenPOWER 64-bit chips to RISC-V chips to Sudoku accelerators, hardware implementations of various games, SRAM/ReRAM generators, and other small ASICs.
Designers are now free to start their projects free of NDAs and usage restrictions.
Researchers are able to make their research repeatable by their peers.
Open-source EDA tools can be deeply integrated with the manufacturing process.
According to a blog post by Google, in addition to the open website, Google has built a community of more than 3,000 members within the industry, where hardware designers and software developers alike can contribute to the advancement of open silicon design on their own way.
As to why, Google said, "Free and open source licensing, community collaboration, and rapid iteration have changed the way we all develop software." We believe we are on the verge of a similar revolution in custom accelerator development, where hardware designers build each other's rather than reinvent the wheel to compete.”
In addition, Google partner Ebaless announced that the "MPW-6" space shuttle is accepting open source projects for the next round of manufacturing.
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