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Comment by kumarski | Hacker News Reader

The time for open source chips is now.

Efabless.com

Er, why do we think open source chips enhance security, when vendors spend $100mns trying to secure their devices?

The biggest problem we have right now is that someone finds a vulnerability in a chip which is at the same time in widespread use and no longer supported by the manufacturer. If everything is open source, anyone can patch the vulnerability even if the OEM won't, and then someone does.

I worked at an electronics place a while back and I remember there were issues in an old chip in some older products. Not talking anything major here but a few known bugs that could have been fixed. But usually nobody had the time allowed to go fix up the old firmware on old products because there were always other things to deal with that were deemed to be a higher business priority. Unfortunately there's often more money to be made by the manufacturer by making the costs of these bugs externalities on the entire market than there is to be made by fixing them. Even when vendors have large budgets to work on security work done on end of life products ends up being typically abandoned because there's just more money to be made elsewhere at the moment. Open source chips could help deal with this end of life issue.

Clickable link: https://Efabless.com

Anyone familiar with ASICs? If I wanted a 8 x AND gate, what would that cost, ballpark figure? I'm just trying to get a handle on the costs and figure that might be a good measure.

If you wanted an 8xAND gate I would recommend the 74LS30. There, saved you a bunch of money.

I think maybe GP means 'what does it cost to get a simple design on a die say for sake of argument 8xAND', i.e. something very small and simple like that, so that it's all fixed cost.

You'd be correct.

I was asking the question to get a handle on base process pricing and experiences for a design currently utilising 500k LUTs and residing in a fpga. But I didn't want to get too bogged down in details.

Do you still recommend the 74LS30 for that?

No, then you should contact a fab that does shuttle runs and take it from there.

I, too, consider it naive to think that a relatively unorganized bunch of people are going to make good chips, write good drivers and support the whole lot for free, and deliver a product that's competitive. There's so much stacked against it. Case in point: Linux on the desktop.

> I, too, consider it naive to think that a relatively unorganized bunch of people are going to make good chips,

It's naive to thing that relatively unorganized bunch of people wrote the most popular OS in existence.

It's much less of a consumer choice, and it's backed by some pretty deep pockets.

It is consumer choice, without any doubt.

If IT people didn't like Linux, it wouldn't have chances.

> Linux on the desktop

You mean it's fully doable and going to become a standard in practice for our peers?

But unfortunately ignored by the masses...

That's fine. At least they have the choice.

Sure, but the complaint was about drivers for 37% of the phones. That's going to stay, even if chip design and/or manufacturing becomes open source. And Linux for the Desktop kind of proves that: the choice is there, but very few take it.

I work on a website that gets responses from a representative sample of the population (age, gender, education, geographical spread, are all balanced; other factors unfortunately not). Linux usage is about 2%.

> Linux usage is about 2%

Considering the amount of very casual users, the usual paretian distribution, the heavy introduction of mobile OS in accessing the web, and the (witnessed) presence of engineers who adopt the motto "Outside work I want to use a Mac to convince me that no issues ever exist", the number makes some sense. I would have computed double as an estimation.

The kernel group is extremely well organized, and lots of other groups are too.

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