THE NEED OF THE HOUR: Why the Semiconductor Industry requires an Open Source awakening?

Rise in silicon technology and the advances in hardware architecture have been instrumental in enabling new computing technologies and applications. But, with increasing chip-design costs and with the fall in the benefits of Moore’s law and Dennard scaling, the advances in silicon technology might well be grinding to a halt. A DigiTimes report found out that foundry companies such as UMC (United Microelectronics), Global Foundries, and Vanguard International Semiconductor (VIS) have raised their 8-inch foundry quotes(In semiconductor industry it is custom to use foundry quotes, related to design requirements than an outright price) by 10-15% .

Moore’s Law looked at the relation between process technology and economics. For half a century  the semiconductor industry pursued excellence in keeping with Moore's law. However now the limitation to pack more transistors onto to a chip is a physical limitation called Dennard scaling which roughly states that as transistors get smaller, their power density stays constant, so that the power used stays  proportionate to area. 

With this problem of continuing to shrink transistors being this hard, giants such as GlobalFoundries and Intel(who have just, on Jan 11, 2021, partnered up with Taiwan semiconductors for their 7 nanometer design process)have thrown in the towel.

With technology barriers, power density limits and diminishing returns, Hardware innovation is slowing. The answer to this challenge lies in concentrating towards Open source hardware.

Along with hardware, EDA software industry too requires a major boost imparted by the open source movement. EDA software is used to take high-level logical descriptions of circuits culminating in a schematic driven layout. A modern-day chip consists of hundreds of pieces of semiconductor intellectual property (IP cores or blocks), and each one of these requires a license from a supplier, which makes the cost to go to the tune of five digits. Thus, Open source can help to lower costs incurred by licensing and bringing forth better designs as more coders  come into play

The benefits of Open source has already shown it's impact on the software industry  who's growth is due largely to free use of an open source software (OSS) ecosystem to build applications, products and host services. Software companies like Facebook, Twitter, Uber etc. all made use of open source software

After having such an impact on the software industry, the open-source movement can be expected to provide the same impetus to the chip industry.

Logos of companies utilizing and working to bring Open Source hardware and software 
for the Semiconductor Industry

Authored by:  Samarth Srivastava

References: 

1.)Kickstarting Semiconductor Innovation with Open Source Hardware by Gagan Gupta; Tony Nowatzki; Vinay Gangadhar; Karthikeyan Sankaralingam[Computer, Volume: 50, Issue: 6, 2017)

2.)Moore's Law is Dead. Now what - By Tom Simonite for MIT Technological Review

3.)Highlights of the day: Foundry Quotes rising by DIGITIMES staff for DIGITIMES

4.) Will Open Source work for chips by Brian Bailey for semiengineering.com