[pjc50]

The problem is that analogue IC design is a field that even digital IC design people regard as black magic. It's clearly possible for that to happen but the set of people who have the skills to do it is very narrow and most of them are probably prevented from doing it in their spare time by their employment agreements.

I wonder how many "test chips" Google will let a non-expert team do to get it right? And whether they provide any "bringup" support?

[Taek]

A big part of the "black magic" really comes down to insufficient tooling. And at least in hardware, insufficient tooling comes down to the fact that everything is open source and trade secret, and teams pretty much refuse to share knowledge with each other.

An open source community would go a long way to fixing an issue like this, and these "black magic" projects are actually a fantastic place for the open source world to get started, because it's an area where there's a ton of room for improvement over the status quo.

[monocasa]

They're only allowing parts that stay within the bounds of the PDK (which only allows digital designs) for now.