Over the past several decades, society has strongly benefited from free and open-source software. More recently, the open-source spirit has expanded to hardware and has energized a new maker community that tinkers with embedded systems at the printed circuit board level. Groundbreaking developments have now also opened the door toward democratizing integrated circuit design.
Last year, Google, SkyWater and efabless have partnered to launch a shuttle program based on SkyWater’s SKY130 open-source process (130 nm CMOS). This technology is offered to the open community along with a complete design flow to enable designers to implement their ideas.
Come find out about how a modern integrated circuit is developed including what software tooling and manufacturing data is needed to build them. The talk will include a background on existing resources, information on both the new DARPA programs enabling new tooling and the new resources Google has released (including a new open source PDK), and finally initial details about a program to help enable everyone (academics, hobbyists and companies) to create integrated circuits that are open down to the transistor!
About Tim 'mithro' Ansell
Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell is a software engineer at Google and has been developing open source software for 20+ years. Tim has recently started trying to shake things up in the hardware accelerator development ecosystem by removing roadblocks to having a completely open ecosystem. Recently he worked with SkyWater Foundry to release a fully open source, manufacturable PDK for their 130nm process node and is funding a free shuttle program for open source designs. He has also contributed to projects in the open EDA ecosystem like OpenROAD, OpenRAM, Magic, and many others.