[zanny]

Nothing about the time frames or even production costs justify the disparity in how proprietary and closed hardware manufacturing is. For the exact reason hardware and software are different open sourcing your patterning toolchain has nothing to do with your competitive advantage in actually having built foundries with functioning lithography. The cost is in the later, the former is just abuse of position for power over the end user.

If anything, it hurts your bottom line. You would probably get more third party interest in having print outs of custom hardware if the toolchains were more open. It is not a question of price, its a question of exposure.

I'm not even talking about the 12-20nm stuff. It is still crazy expensive because the hardware and software R&D was huge and these companies are hoarding their toys like preschoolers because of a prisoners dilemma in regards to competitive advantage. But older 45-100nm plants are often still in use but are still just as inaccessible as ever to most hobbyist hardware enthusiasts.

[Klinky]

If it was really that easy then hobbyists would have found a way to do it on their own by now(e.g. 3D printing). You can't just demand that someone open their billion dollar fabs to amateur hobbyists. It is very likely if the fab is still operating at a certain process, it's because they have profitable business churning through it. If it's not profitable, they retool or close it down. An idle fab is money down the drain, and it's really doubtful hobbyists would be able to fill the gap with a bunch of one-off production runs, while likely needing a lot of hand holding.

Custom circuit boards are coming down in price, maybe custom lithography will come down in price at some point to be accessible to hobbyists / startups.

[AceJohnny2]

> The cost is in the latter, the former is just abuse of position for power over the end user.

Exactly, hence my question about "student projects" which is really about why aren't there more OSS projects that challenge this. Is it because of the lack of platforms to experiment on, or the inherent difficulty of the task?

[seanp2k2]

Thinking about this, yeah it'd be amazing to e.g. Have a community-driven forum with some DIY CPU designs (lisp machines!) with an affordable (let's say under $1k per chip) way to get them made. We'll probably get there eventually, but I'm not aware of where progress on this front is.

[DesiLurker]

this. I always say this, the real credit for success of open source software goes to gcc (egcs for old timers) which allowed developers to make executable code unencumbered with NDAs & royalties.

sometimes I wish somebody with deep pockets (or maybe a semiconductor company) were to buy an ailing EDA company and just opensource all these design tools things would move much faster for opensource h/w design.