Google's Open-Source Silicon Initiative with Global Foundries

A quick unofficial overview of the open-source IC hardware design initiative. This video was assembled after reading through the on-line published information. It covers my understanding of what's going on between Google and Global Foundries, as well as eFabless and other players. The goal is to provide a hopefully useful overview that doesn't seem to be available yet for this material. Leave comments below if you find any errors/etc.

[@fjs1111]

Thank you for sharing this. I've spent hundreds of hours at least reading integrated design materials, I plan to read through what you've posted also. Appreciate everything!!

[@rjordans]

Great to hear GF is joining the initiative, that's a quite interesting development. I had another look at the libraries page and it seems that skywater is working on a 90nm FDSOI library release too even! For the open source tools I believe you can start work a look at the openroad project.

[@MegawattKS]

Thanks. I saw that process mentioned in an Electronic Design magazine article too. Thanks also for the tip on the OpenROAD project. Found this paper and reading up on it now :-) vlsicad.ucsd.edu/Publications/Conferences/383/c383.pdf

[@Fidiffi]

Thanks for the video! One question: the pdk documentation is nice, but have you already tried to put this pdk in use for an analog design? Did you manage to use it with cadene, tanner or any other eda tool? I want to give it a try, but I would appreciate your opinion before getting into the rigmarole of installing the pdk in my environment. As you do, I manly do analog design, and I don’t care much about the digital synthesis. Thanks!

[@MegawattKS]

Sorry, no. Being retired, I no longer have access to Cadence, and haven't tried to load any public domain tools on my personal computers yet. Hopefully someone else can offer some experiences on what tools are compatible, etc...

[@shashibhushan-wd4fl]

T is temperature 25C