Google has announced funding for a number of open source projects to enable them to use GlobalFoundries’ process design kits for silicon chip manufacturing. As part of Google’s efforts to make silicon design and chip manufacturing more accessible to open source projects, they have opened up resources and covered all costs for open source projects to build their early chips on SkyWater’s 130nm process and then upgrade to SkyWater’s 90nm process.
Back in August, Google and GlobalFoundries announced the creation of an open source Process Design Kit (PDK) targeting the latter’s 180nm “180MCU” technology platform.
In the initial announcement, it was implied that Google would continue to offer its “No Cost Silicon Implementation Program” to provide initial batches of chips to be manufactured for those who complete successful open source chip designs. Through the SkyWater program, Google underwrote the cost of six shuttle runs, which resulted in 350 unique silicon designs being realized, of which approximately 240 were successfully manufactured into finished products.
Google is now officially announcing their funding for open source silicon manufacturing using GlobalFoundries 180nm process PDK. In the coming months, there will be a series of no-cost shuttle runs using the GF180MCU. As with the previous runs, the chip design must be fully open source, must be a reproducible source design, must be submitted within a specified time frame, and must pass a pre-fabrication check.
While 180nm is not considered advanced for leading PC components, 180nm still has a large number of practical applications in global industry and is widely used in areas such as the Internet of Things, automobiles, and other more basic electronics.
180nm manufacturing for CPUs was used back in the days of some Intel Celeron CPUs for Socket 478 and AMD Athlon Thunderbird (Sprint) and Duron (Toxic Dragon) processors, etc. GlobalFoundries’ 180nm manufacturing process is still useful for other ASICs, especially for those that are being used by Google bears the cost of startup open source projects.
The first applications are now being accepted for submission until December 5th. Those wishing to learn more can see this blog post from Google on their open source blog. The sponsorship was first announced on October 31, but only appeared on their RSS feed this weekend.
