Matt Venn has announced the opening of another Tiny Tapeout shuttle, giving new and experienced chip designers a chance to have their creations realized in silicon — though this time around, they’ll be receiving manufactured chips on loan.
“IHP25b, our fourth open-source chip with IHP [the Leibniz Institute for High Performance Microelectronics] is now open for digital design submissions,” says Venn of the latest in the Tiny Tapeout series. “We’re very happy to have our next shuttle open and we’re already looking forward to seeing another great set of designs manufactured onto custom silicon. Big thanks to SwissChips for funding the work in porting our infrastructure to IHP’s PDK [Process Design Kit]. Also we want to say thanks to the German BMBF project FMD-QNC (16ME0831) for funding the silicon and IHP for manufacturing it.”
Tiny Tapeout has opened a new shuttle for custom chip production — but you won’t own the chip you receive. (📷: Tiny Tapeout)
Tiny Tapeout is an educational initiative that sees users contribute relatively small open source designs for custom chips, which are then submitted for manufacturing as a “multi-project chip” — tiling everyone’s designs into a single silicon chip, and thus dramatically dropping the per-project cost. Back in March, though, the project hit trouble when Efabless, its primary manufacturing partner, announced it was closing its doors.
The latest shuttle moves from SkyWater Technologies via Efabless to IHP, the Leibniz Institute for High Performance Microelectronics, using its open source process design kit and a revised manufacturing flow. For contributors, there should be little change — except for a wrinkle in the new terms, which sees the resulting chips retained as the property of IHP and only provided to contributors on loan.
“The prototype chips inside the Tiny Tapeout DevKit remain the property of IHP,” the new “chip loan terms” document explains. “You are borrowing these chips for testing and evaluation purposes only. At the end of the agreed usage period you might be asked to return the chips and you agree to comply with this request. The default use term has been established as two years. You may keep the DevKit hardware for future use or development.”
Despite the new restrictive terms, the shuttle is already half-full with nearly 130 days to go. (📷: Tiny Tapeout)
It’s a big shift from Tiny Tapeout’s SkyWater runs, where contributors were free to keep their creations forever — and comes with further restrictions on selling, reselling, or otherwise transferring the chips to third parties, using the chips for commercial purposes, and even on lending the chips “without prior written approval.”
The new shuttle is open for submissions now on the Tiny Tapeout website; ships will only be shipped within the European Union and Switzerland, however, which limits the contribution pool considerably compared to prior manufacturing runs.
