17
votes
Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
Link information
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- Title
- Produce your own physical chips. For free. In the Open.
- Authors
- Philipp Wagner
- Published
- Jun 30 2020
- Word count
- 412 words
Is there a catch here I'm too dumb to understand? Because really this sounds incredible if it's true. I do wonder how many chips they intend to produce per project though? Regardless, there's definitely some details lacking even if I do understand this correctly.
This could be huge for the retro computing community since there are so many components that are hard to find these days. And community projects to recreate old hardware often have to be done with FPGA's now, which are not perfect.
Though I don't have the skills to do it, I'd looked into fabbing your own chips before just out of curiosity, and the prices are insane. There have been some failed attempts to bring them down, but nothing that materialized which I could discover. I looked because I've personally always thought it would be neat to recreate an entire system on a chip, or even just a modern low power version of something from the days of the original x86 chips, like the 80286 or 386.