alt Hacker News> As much as 80 percent of the physical area in today’s most advanced chips is occupied by blocks that aren’t made for specific products or even designed by the consumer-facing companies that built them.
It's morosely sad how so much chipmaking requires not just expensive chipmaking, but incredibly restrictive IP licensing. The whole Silicon Foundry model that lead to such prosperity & growth is now gated upon these primitives of computing, that only a handful of companies know how to make. The academics are all downstream of this control, limited in what they can play with, when they don't have access to ram blocks or ethernet or usb blocks.
I'd had some hopes there for a bit that open source chips were going to eventually work around this, that there's be enough interest in commoditizing and making accessible these things, in the way that open source unlocked so much growth in computing. I still hope I live to see such a re-opening happen. But it feels like it's going to be a lot more decades than I was hoping for.
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Industry wants to have the best memory, SATA, PCIe controllers, floating point units, SRAM units, etc.
Those components need to be optimized to the particular process and the companies that are best at developing them are also the same companies making the tools used to design semiconductors in the first place.
Cadence has to build a feature to design analog electronics in their software package. Then they have to make sure that their designs are compatible/manufacturable at all the foundries. This means they will inevitably develop all the basic components anyway and there is not much point to avoid paying them for the end result.
An integer adder or a multiplier is a commodity, the same adder optimized for a specific fab is a specialized good worth tens of thousands, if it means you can avoid the hassle of a tape out just to test your novel design. Nobody is realistically competing on adder designs and for the complex analog stuff, the development effort may add up to several tapeouts.
China doesn't seem to really care about copyright or other forms of intellectual property. We'll see how long this stuff stays closed and opaque. Not that I believe Chinese chip manufacturers have some desire to open everything up. I just imagine that at some point they'll reach parity with the state of the art and will lack a desire to lock everything up behind trade secrets and contracts, at least initially.
Intellectual property favors the incumbents. If they're the upstart they may want everything to be open because their margins will be better anyway. If they're always going to be the cheapest why should they care about building an intellectual property moat?
But I'm just random dude on the Internet theorizing about the future ;)
The biggest blocker to this vision is the lack of libre EDA tools for "modern" process nodes. As things scale down, new types of analysis are required. The OpenRoad project has some great stuff, but there's a long way to go if we want to build a compelling open IP ecosystem.