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Did you ever dream about creating your own chip? I mean, a physical chip. One which you can hold in your hand, and which does exactly what you’ve designed it to do?

Until today, there were two major road blocks: you had to get access to a process design kit (PDK) from a chip manufacturing house (a foundry), and you had to have enough money to actually pay for the manufacturing. These times are over. Today.

Today, in a FOSSi Dial-Up talk, Tim Ansell of Google announced SkyWater PDK, the first manufacturable, open source process design kit. What differentiates this PDK from previous attempts is the fact that it is manufacturable: with this PDK, you can actually produce chips with the SkyWater foundry in the 130nm node.

That leaves you as chip designer only with one road block: money. Manufacturing chips is expensive – even for more than a decade old nodes like the 130nm node, you need to spend at least a couple thousand dollars.

You know what? Don’t worry – Google and efabless have got you covered! They are providing completely free of cost chip manufacturing runs: one in November this year, and multiple more in 2021. All open source chip designs qualify, no further strings attached!