For the past two years, Google has been working to make silicon design more open source in an effort to push more chip manufacturing projects forward. Through its initial partnership with SkyWater, the tech giant hopes to help project participants ease the cost burden of open-source chips. in late July, Google announced that its open-source silicon design toolkit with SkyWater is moving to 90nm. Now, the company has entered into a 180nm process partnership with GlobalFoundries.
(From: Google Open Source Blog)
In a Google Open Source blog post published Wednesday, the company’s open source team announced that GlobalFoundries has become the latest member to join its Open Source Chip Initiative and provide access to 180nm chip manufacturing technology.
"Google and GlobalFoundries today announced the open source Process Design Kit (PDK) for the Grofond 180nm / 180MCU technology platform. The PDFs are available under the Apache 2.0 license and Google will have a free Efabless silicon implementation project to build the open source design (similar to the SkyWater program)."
Google / gf180mcu-pdk (Portal: GitHub)
Over the past two years, Google has aggressively pushed six times for more than 350 unique silicon designs, and about 240 of them have been built for free.
Now, with access to the SkyWater 90nm and GlobalFoundries 180nm processes, Google’s vision of open source silicon design will see even wider adoption.
While the 180nm number is not very exciting in terms of process “sophistication”, current high-end processors have generally embraced 7nm (and even sub-5nm).
But Phoronix points out that the mature 180nm process is still quite applicable in areas such as IoT, automotive, and MCU/PMIC.
Grosvenor expects its 180nm process to grow to over 22 million wafers by 2026 (compared to 16 million+ per year today).
