GlobalFoundries joins Google's open source chip project and provides 180nm mature design tools

Over the past two years, Google has been working to make silicon design more open source to promote the development of more chip manufacturing projects. Through its initial collaboration with SkyWater, the tech giant hopes to help project participants reduce the cost burden of open source chips. In late July, Google announced that its open source silicon design toolkit with SkyWater was moving to 90nm. Now, the company has reached a 180nm process collaboration with GlobalFoundries.

(Source: Google Open Source Blog)

In a Google open source blog post published on Wednesday, the company's open source team announced that GlobalFoundries has become the latest member to join its "Open Chip Initiative" and provide access to 180nm chip manufacturing technology.

Google and GlobalFoundries today jointly released the open source Process Design Kit (PDK) for GlobalFoundries' 180nm/180MCU technology platform.

The PDF documentation is available under the Apache 2.0 license, and Google will have a free Efabless silicon implementation project to create an open source design (similar to the SkyWater project).

Google/gf180mcu-pdk (GitHub)

Google has actively promoted six times in the past two years, providing assistance for more than 350 unique silicon designs, and about 240 of them have been built for free.

Now, with access to SkyWater 90nm and GlobalFoundries 180nm processes, Google's vision of open source silicon design will be more widely used.

Although from the perspective of the "advancedness" of the process, the number 180nm is not very exciting, after all, current high-end processors have generally embraced 7nm (or even below 5nm).

However, Phoronix pointed out that the mature 180nm process is still quite applicable in areas such as the Internet of Things, automotive, and MCU/PMIC.

GlobalFoundries expects that its 180nm process will achieve growth of more than 22 million wafers by 2026 (currently annual output is only 16 million+).