Material design is one of the fastest growing disciplines in recent years. This is due to the fact that to optimize applications, their design begins to be linked to that of the PC hardware. This situation results in the creation of what we call accelerators on the one hand, and domain-specific processors on the other. However, the fact of designing material implies a human, economic and temporal cost that not everyone has. Something that Google intends to fix this problem with on the Open MPW program.
If we have enough knowledge, we can design hardware for specific needs. The problem is that unless you have a project in your hands that will be massively used, today you can’t manufacture it anywhere. FPGAs obviously do that, but their full configurability is a double-edged sword in terms of cost. It’s also not that we need access to the most advanced fabrication nodes for certain complexity levels and solutions, but the level of complexity we can achieve with configurable chips is relatively low for certain applications.
What is Google’s Open MPW program?
In November 2020, Google struck a deal with SkyWater Technologies to open up its process-based design kit. SKY130. A very simple manufacturing process based solely on a 130 nm node. Although good enough to have a community of 3,000 members who share their fully open hardware design projects.
The idea is therefore not just to be able to design chips, but rather to be able to manufacture and install them in existing products. Thus, the project gives each user the ability to design and manufacture chips
What products were produced?
Well, weird things like:
- Small accelera tors for matrix computing, closely related to artificial intelligence.
- Dedicated systems for encryption and decryption of data.
- Fixed function processors and accelerators to complement heterogeneous ARM or RISC-V based processors.
- Equipment for musical devices such as guitars, keyboards, etc.
- Fully hardware compatible versions of applications such as Sudokus, Tetris or the recently popular Wordle.
The agreement between Google and SkyWater Technologies offers a large number of tools for the design and deployment of hardware solutions, which you can find on their website. All open source.
What advantages does it bring?
The project also gives different teams the freedom to work on the design with an environment similar to that of open source software, but focused on designing new chips. Given that the program designs meet the following premises:
- They do not violate any existing patents.
- They can be easily reproduced by third parties.
What projects would you do and why? We are very interested to know. In any case, if you want to register for the program, hurry up. You have until June 8 in the current call.
