wafer.space: Open silicon manufactured for $2.50 USD per chip!

Twenty years ago, getting a custom circuit board made was slow, expensive, and painful. Then pooling services like OSH Park, JLCPCB, PCBWay, and Seeed Studio made it cheap, predictable, and open to anyone. Tim 'mithro' Ansell believes custom silicon should work the same way, and he has spent the last decade making it happen. While at Google, he drove the release of the SkyWater 130 nm PDK, the world's first open source PDK (the "toolkit" a factory publishes so you can design chips for their production line), along with the free OpenMPW shuttle program built on top of it. Add free design tools like OpenROAD and LibreLane and on-ramps like Tiny Tapeout, and today anyone can design a real chip using nothing but open software. Now with wafer.space, Tim is enabling real low volume production by anyone - hobbyist, scientist, startup and even you! Your design can become 1,000 real chips for as little as $2.50 USD each. Tim shares how we got here, what it takes to go from code on your laptop to a tray of working silicon, and how to get started even if you have never touched hardware.

For those who already know the ecosystem, Tim digs into the details of wafer.space and its shuttle runs on the GlobalFoundries GF180MCU open source PDK, a mature 180 nm mixed signal node that has shipped billions of ICs. Each run offers fixed ~20 mm² slots on a 5 metal layer stack with MIM capacitors and poly resistors. Designs go through an automated platform that handles sign-off (DRC, LVS, ERC, and antenna) whether you use LibreLane, OpenROAD, a proprietary flow, or a mix. You bring your own pad ring and ESD, and every slot returns 1,000 bare or chip-on-board dies. Run 1 taped in December 2025 and the wafers are back from the fab, so Tim has real silicon and real lessons to share: what worked, what broke, and what has improved. Run 2 is now being manufactured, and the upcoming Run 3 is your chance to get your own design onto a wafer. Come find Tim on Discord if you want to dive in before the talk.