[ploxiln]

These details are fascinating and non-obvious. Every little tool or part you have to use to work with even 15-year old chip fab processes is under NDA.

It's hard to come up with a good analogy ... it's like you need to write your own serial driver for your new open-source programming language to do any I/O, because you can't call any libraries or OS syscalls because they're all NDA, even on a 15+ year old computer/OS.

[lkcl]

yehyeh, or you bought a winmodem over 15 years ago, someone told you "hey you have to upgrade to windows 10", it downloads over your 56k Dialup winmodem, reboots... and... no drivers. yes this really happens: ThinkPenguin stock TTYACM USB modems and their biggest customers are Rural people in the USA who are too far out to get broadband!

LIP6 does actually have a fully NDA-free silicon-proven Cell Library, called nsxlib, it's been used in 360nm and 180nm, the 180nm was done by a Japanese University. i think i may have mentioned this already, it's a small town with a 2(?) micron foundry, they make it available to people anywhere in the world entirely for free, it's for training the employees of the town, because it's so old and basic it's hard to mess it up. so they want people to submit designs that the trainees can learn how to fab, before they move on to the more expensive equipment.

but, really, use Chips4Makers, he has 360nm available, EUR 1750 for 20 MPW chips in QFP, i believe.