Next week, EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton will present the Brussels government institution’s draft of the long-awaited chips law. According to reports, 12 billion euros are to flow into the “Chips for Europe” program, with which the EU intends to promote pilot projects in the semiconductor sector, chip design and relevant quantum technology by 2030. In addition, the EU countries have already pledged around 30 billion euros for joint important semiconductor projects.
Practice of Non-Disclosure Agreements
Open-source activists, entrepreneurs and scientists are now campaigning to make the allocation of state money conditional. It is necessary to open up part of the chip production chain, explained Xbox hacker Andrew “bunnie” Huang, who has been involved in open hardware for a long time, on Friday at the virtual EU Open Source Policy Summit at OpenForum Europe. If developments were financed with tax money, researchers and programmers should be allowed to use and reuse the results.
The programmer underscored the widespread practice of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in the semiconductor industry. This is the only way to lower the entry barrier for open chip production.
“Public money, public PDK”
Specifically, Huang spoke out in favor of open process design kits (PDKs). These files form the basis for modeling previously expensive tools used to design an integrated circuit. Google and Skywater Technology Foundry already initiated a certain opening process here in 2020 by allowing universities, start-ups and makers to produce self-designed chips under certain conditions.
Overall, much more open access is needed in this ecosystem, Huang emphasized. The design level of chip factories could be a good start here, but the “packaging” process must also be opened up, i.e. the marriage of silicon chips to carriers, which is currently mostly taking place in Southeast Asia. Conference participants coined slogans such as “Public money, public PDK” in the chat. They referred to the open source campaign “Public money, public code”, according to which software financed with tax money should be free and reusable.
Opening up the design process
Ebrahim Bushehri, head of the British IT house Lime Microsystems, also spoke out in favor of making technologies and tools for semiconductor production such as Electronic Design Automation (EDA) for the automated creation of chip designs more openly available. US companies such as Cadence and Synopsys currently dominate this market, which drives the production of semiconductors with structural widths of less than 10 nanometers (nm).
Lime itself is in the process of “democratizing” the infrastructure in the mobile communications sector down to the chip level with initiatives such as Myriad-RF or LimeNET, Bushehri explained. In the case of field-programmable FPGAs, the opening up of the design process has already worked well since 2015. Projects such as Eurochips and the Interuniversity Microelectronics Center (IMEC) have been launched on the old continent with this goal since the 1980s.
Important chips for Europe
But EDA is of a different caliber, the expert pointed out at the same time. The technology is currently very expensive, is changing quickly and is increasingly being linked to artificial intelligence (AI). In this field, “significantly greater efforts” are therefore needed from the community. In addition, chips in ranges over 10 nm are more important for Europe, since these are sufficient for cars and the wireless Internet architecture, for example. In the high-tech field below 2 nm, the EU would also currently have to compete with Taiwan and South Korea and in the future with China, which alone has set aside around three trillion US dollars to build up its own capacities. But there are hardly any buyers for such top chips in Europe.
Luca Benini, Professor of Digital Circuits at ETH Zurich, also sees the greatest value for the old continent “not in super-billion chips, but in the medium range”. Open Hardware is “ready to get started” here. The EU legislators should therefore open the door with clever specifications for the design of open processors. From there, EDA and PDKs could be tackled. It is crucial to “use the resources correctly in order to achieve a critical mass”.
The EU Commission must ask itself whether it wants to remedy the current lack of chips or whether it wants to establish state-of-the-art semiconductor production in Europe, added Julia Hess from the Neue responsibility foundation. EU institutions are often leaders in semiconductor research. This know-how could best be implemented with international cooperation with like-minded countries. Since chip production depends on a complex global supply chain and has a very high division of labor, bottlenecks could still occur despite all efforts to remedy the situation, for example due to a pandemic with increased demand for consumer electronics or local disasters.
(bme)