[Ground-station] Introducing Michelle Thompson and Tom Spyrou

[Bruce Perens]

Michelle,

This is to introduce you and Tom Spyrou. Tom is from Precision
Innovation,. and is the current tech lead on the OpenROAD project.
OpenROAD is currently the most advanced, fully open source ASIC place
and route tooling, an essential part of creating fully open source
ICs.

Tom has been working with DARPA funding but their grant is ending and
DARPA might wish to push them in the proprietary direction, due to
concerns about enabling a potential enemy, which has led Tom to search
for other funders.

There are obvious synergies between their gate-array work and ORI's
space work, and I mentioned to Tom that having some sort of
on-insulator process would be helpful for space. There is the
potential for Google to help fund that, they've previously gotten
another manufacturer to Open Source design files for an older process.

Precision is potentially interested in ampr.org funding and I think
ampr.org would be delighted to be involved in this. Since you have
been successful in getting a grant from them, and are aware of the
oddities in the ampr.org process, I thought you'd be good to discuss
that with Tom.

I also recently talked with Mike Wishart of e-fabless, who is another
piece of this puzzle - the foundry connection for an Open Source
toolchain.

    Thanks

    Bruce

-- 
Bruce Perens K6BP
- Board Partner, OSS Capital LLC Venture Capital
- CEO, undisclosed startup