Report urges boost to Europe’s open source silicon
An EU project has published a roadmap to accelerate the adoption of open source silicon in the region along with recommendations.
The key recommendation in the report from the Free Silicon Foundation is to rapidly financing projects similar to the DARPA OpenRoad project in the US for open-source EDA tool development.
While there are recommendation son AI and cybersecurity, unfortunately there are no recommendation son the key issues of patents for open source tools and designs.
The report warns that the advent of AI might produce an increased silicon-technology gap between owners of AI and the others and recommends putting in place mechanisms to prevent a further power unbalance between large and small actors. A possible mechanism consists of guaranteeing a fully open development of AI down to the silicon.
It also looks at the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and recommends that the concept of open-silicon is added to the CRA, and open-silicon is recognized as a key ingredient to achieve some of the hardware cybersecurity goals.
- RISC-V chip designed with open source tools
- PragmatIC boost for open source chip design flow
- TinyTapeout boost for open source silicon chip design
US export controls on cutting-edge EDA tools to China and the high commercial costs of tools have seen multiple countries developing their own proprietary and open-source EDA tools, and researchers in Brazil and India have already made significant contributions to existing open-source EDA tools.
The DARPA-funded OpenRoad project (https://theopenroadproject.org/ ) started in 2016 to improve EDA tools with the capacity of running countless parallel instances in parallel (which was seen as impossible using proprietary tools given the unaffordable licence costs) and quickly adapting the code to new approaches including machine learning and AI. This has produced clean layouts down to 12nm. This moving to a non profit structure through the OpenROAD initiative.
However both Synopsys and Cadence Design Systems have been adding AI and scalable cloud implementation to their tools, and Siemens EDA provides its tools at very low cost to university projects.
- Open-source startup offers chip design platform
- Cadence uses AI to automate move to 3nm and 2nm
- Synopsys to add generative AI to design tools
The EU Chips Act could be a key driver for the adoption of open silicon says the report with the the development, possibly by Belgian research lab imec, of an advanced technology node co-funded by public money. The report recommends an open-source Process Design Kit (PDK) alongside the development.
This would produce a PDK with less errors thanks to public scrutiny and community development and enable the development of open-source EDA tools capable of targeting more advanced nodes. However this may require the definition of new standards or languages such as the Design Rules which exist only in advanced nodes or chiplet processes, and it is important that such new standards or languages are developed under a public rather than proprietary licence such as to be usable by the open-source community.
“Open-source PDKs are another necessary condition for open-source silicon. The larger the number of open-source PDKs, the better it is for the open-source silicon community. We recommend launching a call for developing additional PDKs which involves both academia and existing foundries leaving such entities arguing about the necessary development costs,” says the report.
The report highlights potential problems with the cloud-based Design Platform foreseen by the Chips Act in the light of the feedback from multiple European SMEs involved in chip design.
These are related with security, privacy, the too large spectrum of tools, forced upgrades, increased control by EDA vendors, and increased risk of discovery of patent infringement. To mitigate these problems we recommend to support, besides cloud installations, also local EDA installations, and we recommend to support open-source EDA flows besides the commercial flows.
“Policy makers have a big power on influencing the future of open-source development,” says the report. “It is clear that on the short term open-source silicon will play a marginal role, but it can become on the long term a valuable, if not essential, tool to meet not only the goals set by the Chips Act but also to guarantee that silicon technology and all its derivatives are developed in a human-centric, cooperative, innovative and sustainable way. We hope that the EU will acknowledge the role that open-source development can play to reach these goals and will decide to invest strongly and decisively in open-source.”
www.f-si.org; wiki.f-si.org/index.php?title=Recommendations_and_roadmap_for_the_development_of_open-source_silicon_in_the_EU
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