Open Source Silicon Project Tiny Tapeout Hits Trouble as Efabless Shuts Its Doors
Sudden funding-related closure leaves Tiny Tapeout's Matt Venn looking for a new path to manufacturing.
Semiconductor design platform Efabless has announced it is shutting down its operations with immediate effect — leaving Matt Venn's Tiny Tapeout on the hunt for an alternative way to affordably manufacture its contributors' creations.
"Due to funding challenges," a notice on the Efabless website, which otherwise appears to remain operational and still advertises the company's services, announces, "Efabless has shut down operations until further notice. We regret any inconvenience and will provide updates as available."
The announcement, which came less than a month after Efabless' Michael Wishart promised "a bright future" for the company with a "go-to-market strategy [which] is gaining traction with 50 academic institutions using Efabless and 80 commercial designs taped out since our inception," comes as sources suggest a grant on which the company had been banking did not materialize.
The closure shuts down Efabless' chipIgnite platform, which sought to lower the cost of custom silicon chip production with a multi-project wafer (MPW) approach in which designs from different submitters are placed on a single silicon wafer to spread the cost out.
It's chipIgnite which served as the manufacturing back-end for Tiny Tapeout, a project from Matt Venn that invited designers experienced and otherwise to submit open source chip designs for production — packing compact tile-based designs into a multi-project chip on a chipIgnite multi-project wafer to further drop the cost down to as little as a hundred dollars per design. As a result, the current Tiny Tapeout manufacturing run is on hold — and questions remain as to whether the existing submitted but not-yet manufactured runs will take place.
"Right now we have TT08 [Tiny Tapeout Run 8] awaiting packaging and TT09 is still in the SkyWater Technology fab," Venn explains, referring to Efabless' partner semiconductor fabrication firm. "These chips represent a huge investment of time and energy from hundreds of people and we currently don’t know if we’ll receive them. The current TT10 shuttle and future Sky130 [SkyWater 130nm process] shuttles are paused while we explore options for Sky130 and other processes.
"We already have an existing relationship with IHP, which offers a similar 130nm process. We've completed two experimental tapeouts with them, and our next public shuttle will likely be with them in June. We are also trying to find a route to manufacture on GlobalFoundries GF180, an existing open source PDK [Process Design Kit]."
For now, all Tiny Tapeout fans can do is watch the website for more news — and if the in-production runs do end up being canceled, Venn has confirmed that refunds will be provided to everyone affected.
