Google will make your own chips for free - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2020, 04:11:17 pm
content: https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/free-chips-2020-07/or, if you don't have time for a 95 minutes video, here are theslides only.

author: jmelson
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2020, 05:23:04 pm
content: Hmmm, we have had chips made through MOSIS and now Europractice, in a shared-project wafer mode. NOT at all cheap, a 5 x 7 mm chip in a relatively modest technology runs about US $40K without packaging, for a very short run of, say, 160 die. While I can see some subsidized projects that are interesting to the provider of the subsidy, no WAY will they fabricate any and all projects for free.Jon

author: mian2zi3
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2020, 05:31:37 pm
content: I watched the video. They are aiming to do a multi-project wafer with 40 projects every 3 months. If they get more than 40 projects, they decide on a selection criteria (he mentioned lottery as one option). Projects get 10mm^2 of silicon and deliver ~100 chips (packaged).

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2020, 05:31:54 pm
content: An obvious question: what is in it for Google? Are they looking to gain experience in IC manufacturing? Are they looking to create a market place and be in control that manufacturing? Are they looking to scrape information on what is of interest to engineers? Else?

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2020, 05:45:08 pm
content: They are working on an open source EDA tools for chips design. It is almost ready and they need to test it, and they'll also need to build a user base familiar with the new tools.They can run test and then debug the chips by themselves, or they can do what they are doing now, where everybody benefits. They told in the video to consider your project as open source and disposable, so it might or it might not work, but I think it is still a very good deal for the beta testers.

author: DC1MC
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2020, 05:58:18 pm
content: Somebody should design a superl-LTZ1000 reference, with an on-chip heater, 50 diodes in parallel and a buffer.Cheers,DC1MC

author: Weston
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2020, 06:01:21 pm
content: I think you are under estimating the money that google can just throw around (and write off as R&D type expenses...).The cheapest shared project wafer service nowdays is ~$5k for a small IC and the process node is relatively old, so I don't think google is throwing absolutely massive amounts of money at this or anything.IC design is really hard to get experience in and all of the tooling is closed source and really expensive. Getting access to the cell libraries alone requires NDAs. Google is most likely trying to build up a community around open source hardware design / IC design which will help in the talent pool, benefiting their own recruiting in the future. Companies fund PhD students all the time and get relatively little out of it, I would not be surprised if they got a greater return for their dollar in terms of talent development / recruiting with this.I have been wanting to get into IC design for a while now, but my own research group does not do work in the area. Free is a nice price to try something out, so I have been following this closely. Anything I do is going to require the analog cell libraries though, which they have not released yet.

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2020, 06:10:36 pm
content: Having worked for mid to big size companies i can hardly see "where everyone benefits" being a motivation for businesses.

author: mian2zi3
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2020, 06:23:44 pm
content: Quote from: Bud on July 07, 2020, 05:31:54 pmTim addresses this directly in the video:https://youtu.be/EczW2IWdnOM?t=407. Google wants to create an open, innovative ecosystem for silicon so it will be easier for them to build accelerators for their workloads to meet the growing demand for compute. TPU is only one example of the kind of accelerators they want to build.

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2020, 12:23:11 am
content: Quote from: jmelson on July 07, 2020, 05:23:04 pmThat's 35mm^2, which is pretty big for an IC. Many MCUs are smaller than that, as evidenced by the size of the packages they come in.

author: jmelson
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2020, 12:52:58 am
content: Quote from: amyk on July 08, 2020, 12:23:11 amYes, our stuff is mxed-signal, but 90% of the area is analog, with some great big transistors for noise, and big capacitors to store charge until the result is read out. So, no, they aren't small.Jon

author: magic
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2020, 06:44:36 am
content: Quote from: Bud on July 07, 2020, 05:31:54 pmWe are just giving free shit away, why are you asking questions like some conspiracy theorist, comrade?No idea. Maybe it's for the development of their design package which they may want to use internally for their future chip projects. Having briefly worked at a company that supplied stuff to Google, I can assure you that they absolutely loathe being dependent on (somebody else's) proprietary software. They are evil but they aren't that dumbhttps://github.com/google/skywater-pdkQuoteYou probably aren't building an LTZ1000 on that

author: Fred Basset
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2020, 08:58:08 am
content: Quote from: amyk on July 08, 2020, 12:23:11 amThat's 35mm^2, which is pretty big for an IC. Many MCUs are smaller than that, as evidenced by the size of the packages they come in.Could make a pretty good sensor chip though - If anyone has any ideas?Whatever happened to Microsoft doing something similar for 3D tools? We got paint 3D and that is all isn't it? It was supposed to make 3D printers practically plug and play on W10.