Join for quick access. Enter your email below and we'll send confirmation plus sign you up to our newsletter.
By submitting your information, you confirm you are aged 16 or over,
have read our
Privacy Policy
and agree to the
Terms & Conditions. Geographical rules apply.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Join the club
Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards.
An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
Google Teams Up with US Government for Open-Source Chips
Google and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on Wednesday signed a joint research and development pact under which Google will finance production of open-source chips that could be used by academic and small business researchers to build a variety of emerging applications.
The majority of newly developed devices require chips to enable their core or 'smart' functionality. But startups usually formed in universities and small businesses typically do not have money to develop their own chips, order custom chips from design houses, or procure large quantities of of-the-shelf components. But scholars and small companies tend to have some bright ideas when it comes to emerging applications, which is why to NIST decided to team up with Google to help them turn their ideas into products.
From Lab to Factory, Quickly
Under the terms of the deal, NIST and its university research partners* will design 40 open-source chips optimized for different applications, while Google will finance initial cost of setting up production and will fund the first production run. Those chips as well as their open-source designs will be available to academic and small business researchers who work on various projects. Some of those chips could be used to power various innovative devices without paying licensing fees, whereas other could be customized further to build ICs aimed at a specific application.
The key idea of NIST's initiative is to provide essential building blocks to interested parties in a bit to speed up prototyping and then product integration, thus cutting down time-to-market for new products. Startups creating the most promising products could end up being acquired by Google or other high-tech giants.
NIST does not specify what kind of open-source chips it plans to design, but it says that it is looking to address new kinds of memory devices, nanosensors, bioelectronics, and advanced devices needed for artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
"Moving to an open-source framework fosters reproducibility, which helps researchers from public and private institutions iterate on each other's work," said Will Grannis, CEO of Google Public Sector. It also democratizes innovation in nanotechnology and semiconductor research.
200-mm Wafers, 130nm Node
The open-source ICs designed by NIST and its partners will be produced by SkyWater Technology at its 200-mm fab in Bloomington, Minnesota.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
(Image credit: SkyWater)
For now, NIST and Google do not mention which process technologies will be used, but SkyWater and Google already have an open-source 130nm process design kit (PDK) that can be used to design new chips or customize other open-source designs. Meanwhile, SkyWater offers 90nm and 130nm process technologies as well as has a qualified 65nm production node.
Interestingly, SkyWater will supply those open-source chips on wafers, which will require universities and other purchasers to dice them into individual dies, assemble them into appropriate packages, and test the final chips at their own processing facilities.
*University of Michigan, the University of Maryland, George Washington University, Brown University, and Carnegie Mellon University.
Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
This is Kool outside of building new fabs and the chips act education is a huge part of innovation all this investment into semiconductors hope there on track with education to for all those nice new fabs. In alot of big cities Spanish is a requirment in the introduction (class you have to take to start college) iv always thought rather than teaching a second language maybe computer programming or somthing to that affect should be required as it prolly is in china
If you layout your own chip, it would be extremely difficult for a third-party to insert functionality without causing silicon results to have multiple inexplicable divergences from post-place-and-route simulation results. To put in a backdoor after-the-fact, the "attacker" would need to reverse-engineer your design to find out where and how to insert it.
If an "open foundry" was going to put backdoors in, it would have to be integrated into IP-cores (ex.: XPU cores, USB, PCIe, Ethernet, memory, etc.controllers) you put in your design, then the foundry only needs to worry about having at least one way (ex.: Ethernet, USB, PCIe) to access its IPcore-to-IPcore network and installed backdoors.
