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

[Bruce Perens]

Hi Tim, let's talk during the week.

Bruce

On Sun, May 23, 2021, 11:20 Tim 'mithro' Ansell <me at mith.ro> wrote:

> 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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