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Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

So what's the secret sauce that cadence is not allowed to sell to personas non gratas? The article just says EDA tools but that's so broad. Is KiCAD export restricted?

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For EDA, gate-all-around technologies used in 2nm processes are banned from export by ITAR. This applies to device electrical modeling as well as physical design layout rules. You won’t find these GAA in KiCAD or OpenROAD.

I think for this case though it was specifically because Cadence sold a commercial product to a banned entity, instead of anything technology related.

> You won’t find these GAA in KiCAD or OpenROAD.

Is this actually because of legal requirements, or because of reality?

Nobody with access to a bleeding-edge node is using vastly inferior FOSS tools that can't actually work with a brand new fab PDK (which was produced specifically for Synopsys or Cadence tools.)

If you read the article, you will see that the technology is specifically semiconductor design tools required for developing high performance computing that the PRC would use for nuclear weapons development. Can you do that with KiCAD? No.

> specifically semiconductor design tools required for developing high performance computing

I call that EDA for brevity

> Can you do that with KiCAD?

Yes, depending how you define "high performance computing" (my question here)

Isn’t KiCAD limited to PCB design, or is my understanding out of date?

Cadence tooling is for end-to-end electronics design - from transistor/standard cell up to PCB.

So technically they’re both EDA tools, but one is in another league as far as sophistication goes.

People have hacked kicad into doing layout with the e.g. skywater 130 PDK. I wouldn't recommend it, but it's possible.

There's a whole lot more to an EDA tool than just layout or running spice though.

KiCAD might not be a great example, but you could with something like https://github.com/The-OpenROAD-Project/OpenROAD (or roughly along those lines - I'm not a hardware person), no?

The parent's question still seems applicable. Is this basically down to a judge to decide the line at which a certain technology is too advanced to export? Would open sourcing an EDA tool be illegal if it was sufficiently capable?

Licensing as "open source" wouldn't be illegal, but the act of exporting would be. I've certainly seen libre software downloads that have click-throughs where you attest you're not in certain prohibited countries, IP blocks (eg Github does this site-wide AFAIK), etc. No idea if this will continue to be "enough" under this new fascist regime that doesn't care much for institutions like the rule of law. Probably fine up until it isn't, at which point ceasing and desisting would probably be enough unless you're deemed "woke" or some other kind of unperson.

(I'm not a member of any guilds. And I guess the downvote is for the political incorrectness. Plus ça change)

The violations are listed by their specific ECCNs, which you can lookup here: https://www.bis.gov/regulations/ear/interactive-commerce-con...

"These exports or reexports included the following transactions between 2015 and 2020:

a) Ten (10) sales and exports of EDA hardware, including items classified under ECCN 3B991b.2.c;

b) Seventeen (17) sales and exports or reexports of EDA software, including items classified under ECCN 3D991 or designated EAR99;

c) Seven (7) sales and exports or reexports of semiconductor design technology, specifically IP, including items classified under ECCN 3E991; and

d) Twenty-Two (22) loans and exports of EDA hardware, including items classified under ECCN 3B991b.2.c and items designated EAR99 "

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