Google Launches New Silicon Design Portal For Open-Source Projects

Google has been helping small open-source projects get started in chip fabrication with Google covering the costs and partnering with SkyWater Technology using their open-source process design kit (PDK). While the chip manufacturing is done on a 130nm process (SKY130), this effort has proven to be a big success for open-source hardware projects with limited funding and Google today announced a new silicon design portal.

The Google Open MPW Shuttle Program allows for anyone to submit open-source integrated circuit designs and to see it manufactured at no-cost while leveraging this open-source PDK and other open-source EDA tools. The 130nm manufacturing has also proven still useful for prototyping IoT-like hardware

Build Custom Silicon With Google, At Least For Open-Source Designs

The Open MPW Shuttle Program has seen submissions ranging from the Microwatt OpenPOWER 64-bit core to RISC-V cores to Sudoku accelerators, hardware implementations of various games, SRAM/ReRAM generators, and other small ASICs.

Google partner Efabless has announced the "MPW-6" shuttle is accepting open-source projects for their next round of manufacturing and the submission deadline is 8 June.

To help in the open-source silicon design effort, Google has launched their new design portal at developers.google.com/silicon. More details on the effort via the Google Open-Source Blog.