| Very excited to see another foundry join up! Welcome GlobalFoundries! Last week SkyWater announced a 90nm PDK, which is smaller than the current SkyWater 130nm. Also crucially, this one is FDSOI (fully-depleted silicon on insulator), which keeps chips from leaking power, meaning this should be much more ideal for any kind of mobile always-on design. Neat. And now comes GF's 180MCU PDK. At first, it's like: this is bigger, what the heck! But it's designed for mixed signal & power designs, like Power Management Integrated Circuits (PMICs). Really neat having something a little smaller and something a little bigger right near where we started. I really hope some of the existing people who've done open chip design on the existing shuttles get to make similar-ish chips on the new bigger & smaller processes & can nicely characterize some of the performance differences. This all just makes so much sense. Making sure chipmaking is a healthy, robust, creative, growing industry is in everyone's interest. Without efforts like this, it feels like the industry is at risk of too much consolidation, of everyone getting bought out and/or giving up, and there not being vibrant chipmaking at all. The wave of buyouts across the 201X's was shocking. I continue to think part of the chipmaking crunch was just that there are so many less independent entities now; the diversity of the ecosystem is way down. |