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by pjc50 2695 days ago
> super low cost hardware development.

There are lots of things that cost money in hardware design, and ISA licensing is a very small part of them.

Edit: I wonder if I should do a rather confrontational blog post telling people why Open hardware is never going to be the free lunch that open source software is..
3 comments
microcolonel 2695 days ago
> I wonder if I should do a rather confrontational blog post telling people why Open hardware is never going to be the free lunch that open source software is..

Bunnie Huang spoke at one of the RISC-V summits on this topic.

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wolfgke 2695 days ago
> There are lots of things that cost money in hardware design, and ISA licensing is a very small part of them.

Indeed - and this is exactly the point of ISA licensing (and IP blocks): to make it sufficiently cheaper to just license the ISA or IP blocks instead of developing the product from ground up.

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q3k 2694 days ago
Right, but with RISC-V you can actually have some competition to implement RISC-V between multiple vendors, hopefully driving prices down.
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wolfgke 2694 days ago
> Right, but with RISC-V you can actually have some competition to implement RISC-V between multiple vendors, hopefully driving prices down.

I am not convinced that competition is always a good thing here: lots of competitors lead to shrinking margins. This means less money that can be invested into innovating by the respective companies.

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rbanffy 2694 days ago
> Open hardware is never going to be the free lunch that open source software is..

Unless we can automate the chip making process. Think of it as the chip version of PCB micromanufacture or 3D printing. At some point someone will make a business out of making boards and placing all the components for you. The trick is to do it without any retooling and no humans involved.

What is the manufacturing cost of a wafer full of, say, CPUs? If we can all get our designs in there, we can share the manufacturing cost.

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pjc50 2694 days ago
> What is the manufacturing cost of a wafer full of, say, CPUs? If we can all get our designs in there, we can share the manufacturing cost.

This is called "multi project wafer" or "shuttle service" if you want to look for it.

Actual prices are pretty rare, but I happened to find some: https://nmi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/01-Easy-Access... ; those line up with what I've heard. $25,000 for a few chips from the MPW service, or $100k for your own mask set then $1-2k per wafer.

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rbanffy 2694 days ago
Can the setup process be automated? What does the 100k cover?
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