The gap this closes is real. IceStorm and Apicula gave you open tooling but you were still loading bitstreams onto someone else's closed fabric. Yosys/nextpnr same story. Aegis is the first time the fabric itself is auditable, which matters a lot for anyone building hardware that needs a complete trust chain from RTL down to GDS. The wafer.space + open PDK path makes it actually tapeout-able, not just a simulation exercise. Curious how the LUT4 fabric competes on density against GF180 commercial offerings, that's usually where open implementations get humbling
How far away are we from being able to run a hobby Linux on something like that, a completely hardware-backdoor-free system?
How do you verify that the fab produces the design authentically? They could create a security vulnerability only they know how to exploit.