General > General Technical Chat

Google will make your own chips for free

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jmelson:

--- Quote from: amyk on July 08, 2020, 12:23:11 am ---
--- Quote from: jmelson on July 07, 2020, 05:23:04 pm ---Hmmm, we have had chips made through MOSIS and now Europractice, in a shared-project wafer mode.  NOT at all cheap, a 5 x 7 mm chip in a relatively modest technology runs about US $40K without packaging, for a very short run of, say, 160 die.  While I can see some subsidized projects that are interesting to the provider of the subsidy, no WAY will they fabricate any and all projects for free.

Jon

--- End quote ---
That's 35mm^2, which is pretty big for an IC. Many MCUs are smaller than that, as evidenced by the size of the packages they come in.

--- End quote ---
Yes, our stuff is mxed-signal, but 90% of the area is analog, with some great big transistors for noise, and big capacitors to store charge until the result is read out.  So, no, they aren't small.

Jon

magic:

--- Quote from: Bud on July 07, 2020, 05:31:54 pm ---An obvious question: what is in it for Google? Are they looking to gain experience in IC manufacturing? Are they looking to create a market place and be in control that manufacturing? Are they looking to scrape information on what is of interest to engineers? Else?

--- End quote ---
We are just giving free shit away, why are you asking questions like some conspiracy theorist, comrade?

No idea. Maybe it's for the development of their design package which they may want to use internally for their future chip projects. Having briefly worked at a company that supplied stuff to Google, I can assure you that they absolutely loathe being dependent on (somebody else's :P) proprietary software. They are evil but they aren't that dumb ;)

https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk

--- Quote ---The SKY130 is a mature 180nm-130nm hybrid technology originally developed internally by Cypress Semiconductor before being spun out into SkyWater Technology and made accessible to general industry. SkyWater and Google’s collaboration is now making this technology accessible to everyone!


The SKY130 Process node technology stack consists of;

    Support for internal 1.8V with 5.0V I/Os (operable at 2.5V)
    1 level of local interconnect
    5 levels of metal
    Is inductor-capable
    Has high sheet rho poly resistor
    Optional MiM capacitors
    Includes SONOS shrunken cell
    Supports 10V regulated supply
    HV extended-drain NMOS and PMOS
--- End quote ---
You probably aren't building an LTZ1000 on that :P

Fred Basset:

--- Quote from: amyk on July 08, 2020, 12:23:11 am ---
--- End quote ---
That's 35mm^2, which is pretty big for an IC. Many MCUs are smaller than that, as evidenced by the size of the packages they come in.
[/quote]

Could make a pretty good sensor chip though - If anyone has any ideas?

Whatever happened to Microsoft doing something similar for 3D tools?  We got paint 3D and that is all isn't it?  It was supposed to make 3D printers practically plug and play on W10.

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