Changing the Chip Industry

How Public Investment Has Grown Open Silicon

Together with Linux Magazine NLnet will publish a five-part article series on how public funding of open source contributes to digital autonomy. Each article, written by Jeffrey A. McGuire, focuses on a specific ecosystem supported by the NGI Zero programs that is of strategic importance to increase digital autonomy. The first article in the series delves into Open Electronic Design Automation. Read Changing the Chip Industry on the Linux Magazine website, download the PDF. Or start with the excerpt below.

A chip on a world map connecting to many different territories

Changing the Chip Industry: How Public Investment Has Grown Open Silicon

In 2019, in a small restaurant in Paris, a man set a laptop on a dinner table for two other engineers to examine. What was on it should not have existed. They were looking at a Process Design Kit, or PDK: the complete set of physical rules and transistor models used by a chip factory in the United States to manufacture silicon. These documents were among the most fiercely guarded in the global technology industry; no engineer outside the factory’s customer roster could see one without first signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). The fact that it was on a laptop in Paris, with no NDA attached, was the start of something.

Seven years later, that beginning has become a small constellation of open silicon projects. Together, they enable the design and manufacture of working chips with software anyone can read, modify, and share.

European Union public money has paid for a meaningful part of what now exists, and most Europeans have no idea. To see why it matters, you have to understand what designing a chip actually entails, and why almost none of that process was open before 2019.

How Chips Get Designed: EDA

Picture the work that ends in producing a microchip as a tall stack of software. At the top, humans sit at keyboards writing in hardware description languages such as SystemVerilog. Their code describes what the chip should do in terms of logic, not yet as physical shapes. Beneath that human-readable layer, a pile of automated tools translates the logic downward: Synthesis turns the description into gates, placement and routing decide where those gates sit on the silicon surface of the chip, verification checks the design against its specification, and sign-off tools confirm that the design meets the manufacturing rules and standards of the chip factory — called a “foundry” in the industry. At the bottom of the stack, the foundry uses finished designs to produce physical chips.

Continue reading the article on the Linux Magazine website