[Board] Help with getting new IC development investment directed towards truly open solutions?

[Tim 'mithro' Ansell]

Hi!

As you may have seen, the US government (like many other governments) is
looking to invest heavily in bringing integrated circuit manufacturing back
onto US soil. These numbers are crazy huge (in the order of $1-5 billion)
and I'm working on ways to get at least some fraction of these funds
directed towards making more open integrated silicon creation solutions.

I've already had some success using groups like my employer (Google) and
groups like DARPA and have been able to get a manufacturable PDK for a
130nm process node released as open source (
https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk) and am funding an associated
no-cost shuttle program for open source designs (
https://efabless.com/open_shuttle_program). Which has provided me with a
lot of allies inside various government entities (specially in scientific
communities who can now publish more reproducible results not under NDA!).

To help these allies promote the cause of open source IC creation inside
their respective groups I'm looking for any resources that they can use
which shows why investing in open source is a good idea. *Would you happen
to have any information on already existing well written papers which do an
analysis of why supporting open source is a good economic investment?*

Generally stuff that would be targeted towards people who work at
government funding entities or members of the legislature would be the
best. Papers which draw analogies with the strong return on economic
investment in a similar manner to public infrastructure like railway /
roads / etc would be great.

On a related note, I'm also interested in understanding if the work I'm
doing could help with your open aerospace efforts. For example, IBM have
recently been open sourcing older POWER processors (
https://github.com/openpower-cores) and I've been suggesting they should
release the PowerPC 750 which is currently being used on the Perseverance
rover on Mars.

If you think jumping on a video chat would accelerate things, I'm more than
happy to do that and are in the US/Pacific timezone.

Looking forward to your response!

Tim 'mithro' Ansell
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