Hardware Podcasts

Fabless Chip Design with Mohamed Kassem

The Amp Hour · 2 Aug 2020 · 1h 29m · Episode 503

What this episode covers

Mohamed Kassem, co-founder and CTO of eFabless, explains how the company is democratizing fabless chip design through the OpenLANE tool flow and the newly announced open-source PDK from Google and Skywater. He details the economic shift that lowers the barrier to entry for custom silicon, reducing upfront costs from hundreds of thousands to under $10,000 for prototypes, and discusses the technical architecture of OpenLANE, including its use of OpenRoad and Yosys to generate GDS files. Kassem also describes the 'Raptor' configuration tool that allows system designers to generate custom chip RTL without deep hardware knowledge, and highlights the collaborative validation of the Skywater PDK by the open-source community.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
eFabless, Skywater, Google, ARM, GlobalFoundries
Products
Raven, Raptor, Strive
Tools
OpenLANE, OpenRoad, Yosys, Magic

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