Efabless Joins CHIPS Alliance to Accelerate the Growth of the Open Source Chip Ecosystem

Efabless to give a talk on the OpenROAD project at the CHIPS Alliance Workshop on Sept. 17

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 16, 2020 – CHIPS Alliance, the leading consortium advancing common and open hardware for interfaces, processors and systems, today welcomed Efabless, a crowdsourcing design platform for custom silicon, as its latest member. Efabless is already an active participant in several open source initiatives that the CHIPS Alliance is involved in, including the OpenROAD project and the Open Source Shuttle Program.

“The mission of the CHIPS Alliance to democratize silicon design nicely aligns with our focus on changing how chip design is done forever. Our platform is essentially an ecosystem-in-a-box that’s instantly accessible to designers anywhere to create and deliver new chip solutions faster than traditional approaches,” said Mohamed Kassem, co-founder and CTO at Efabless. “Through the CHIPS Alliance and other open source initiatives, we’re working to make it easier for design teams of all sizes to define, develop, collaborate and monetize their work.”

At the CHIPS Alliance Workshop on Thursday, Sept. 17, Kassem and Andrew Kahng of OpenROAD and UCSD will be presenting the session “OpenROAD open RTL-to-GDS update.” The talk will discuss the OpenROAD autonomous and fully open flow for chip design.

“We’ve been impressed with Efabless’ strong commitment to accelerating open source chip innovation,” said Dr. Zvonimir Bandić, Chairman, CHIPS Alliance. “We look forward to working closely with Efabless and our other members to continue to lower the cost of developing IP and tools for hardware development.”

Efabless is collaborating with SkyWater Technology Foundry and CHIPS Alliance members Google and Antmicro on an open source SkyWater PDK (Process Design Kit) for the 130 nm CMOS process technology. Efabless will make the design for this PDK simple and affordable by integrating resources on its cloud-based design platform including: an open source based end-to-end ASIC design flow – openLANE based on OpenROAD, Yosys and Magic; the open source striVe family of full ASIC reference designs; and a marketplace for monetizing chip and IP designs. This project will help lower the cost of entry for chip manufacturing, making chip design more accessible for everyone.

Additionally, Efabless is managing the Open Source Shuttle Program sponsored by Google. This program will provide free of cost chip manufacturing runs for open source designs. The first run is scheduled for November 2020, and another will take place in early 2021.

To check out the schedule for the CHIPS Alliance Workshop and register for this free event, please visit: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/chips-alliance-workshop/program/schedule/.

About the CHIPS Alliance

The CHIPS Alliance is an organization which develops and hosts high-quality, open source hardware code (IP cores), interconnect IP (physical and logical protocols), and open source software development tools for design, verification, and more. The main aim is to provide a barrier-free collaborative environment, to lower the cost of developing IP and tools for hardware development. The CHIPS Alliance is hosted by the Linux Foundation. For more information, visit chipsalliance.org.

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation was founded in 2000 and has since become the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Today, the Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and its projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure, including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on employing best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, visit linuxfoundation.org.