Pointing the way to free and open silicon
The EU-funded GOIT project has published recommendations and a roadmap to speed up the adoption of open-source silicon in Europe. The report highlights the way to boosting Europe’s competitiveness and resilience in semiconductor technologies and making it a leader in the field. Europe’s IT hardware development is constantly hampered by obstacles such as exorbitantly priced development tools, legal constraints and political events. Added to that, the region’s digital infrastructure is heavily reliant on foreign closed-source chips, where only the creators can access and modify the design files and which have also been known to contain malicious or unintended functions. This makes hardware development costly and inefficient.
Meeting Chips Act goals
On the other hand, open-source silicon chips, as their name suggests, can be shared and modified to suit specific needs because their design is publicly accessible. By enabling greater flexibility and customisation, open-source hardware can also lead to faster innovation and advancements in the semiconductor industry. The report argues that open-source electronic design automation (EDA) tools – used to design semiconductors, integrated circuits and circuit boards – and open-source silicon are essential if Europe is to achieve many of the goals outlined in the European Chips Act. The authors identify potential problems with the cloud-based design platform proposed in the Chips Act. These problems relate to security, privacy, the plethora of available tools, forced upgrades, increased control by EDA vendors and the higher risk of patent infringement discovery. Their proposed solutions include supporting local EDA installations in addition to cloud installations, and also open-source EDA flows in addition to commercial flows. With regard to standardisation, in light of how different open-source development needs are from the mainstream industrial approach, the report highlights six conditions that standards should fulfil to be adopted by the open-source community. These are freely and easily accessible standard definitions, transparency in standard defining processes and mechanisms to facilitate merging of standards. In addition, standards should be easily upgradeable, their adoption should be driven by their quality rather than a standards-setting body’s prestige and they should include a software reference implementation.
A fresh new perspective from academia
Given the important role that academia could play in open-source silicon and EDA tool development, the authors recommend that metrics evaluating academics should include open-source projects and that “a new generation of professors is hired to develop open-source EDA tools and to revive the corresponding knowledge in Europe.” Emphasis is placed on the importance of bringing new and independent personnel into academia. The report touches on ecological sustainability and patent threats, and it also briefly discusses potential AI impact on chip design. It further recommends adding the open-silicon concept to the Cyber Resilience Act and recognising open silicon “as a key ingredient to achieve some of the hardware cybersecurity goals.” The GOIT (Go IT!) report ends with a roadmap for open-source silicon development, the key message being the rapid financing of projects similar to the United States’ DARPA-funded OpenROAD project. Policymakers can greatly influence the future of open-source development, the report concludes, emphasising that open-source silicon can in the long term help to meet the goals set by the Chips Act and guarantee the human-centric, cooperative, innovative and sustainable development of silicon technologies. “We hope that the EU will acknowledge the role that open-source development can play to reach these goals and will decide to invest strongly and decisively in open-source.” For more information, please see: GOIT project website
Keywords
GOIT, silicon, chip, open source, semiconductor, Electronic Design Automation, Chips Act
