Making a chip required used to require a project with a million-dollar ...demonstrate setting up the open source tool chain to become an effective platform for ... computing R&D.

[Art Scott]

Aloha posit community.
Mahalo for your standard work.

Please consider making your own posit chip. Free Open.

https://revcomp.org/make-a-chip/

Making a chip required used to require a project with a million-dollar (USD) budget and was further inaccessible to individuals and small groups because commercial semiconductor fabs required Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs).

Yet, the Sky130 open-source chip design program https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk emerged in the last couple years that allows anybody with internet access and a laptop to design a chip. Fabbing the design is possible through a Google/SkyWater free multi-project wafer fab https://www.skywatertechnology.com/mpw/open-source-mpw-program/. Basic testing should be possible with readily available lab equipment.

Let me describe what I did in a couple weeks. Individuals and small groups can make important innovative contributions to technology at certain phases of development. So, tried to see what I could do from an office in an extra bedroom in my house and a handful of Windows 10/11 PCs. Having worked in the field for some time, my experience is not representative of a new entrant, but I wanted to demonstrate setting up the open source tool chain to become an effective platform for reversible computing R&D.

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[John Gustafson]

Ananth Kinnal, founder and CEO of CalligoTech in Bangalore, tells me they are making a multicore RISC-V chip in VLSI (not an FPGA) and will have 100 samples by the end of the year. Some of the cores use floats, others use posits, making it quite easy to choose which format you want to experiment with… but the speed should be very comparable to current-generation microprocessors for both formats. 

https://calligotech.com/products/?tab=activity

Raul Murillo achieved significant reductions in the chip area and total logic delay of posit functional units, presented at CoNGA 2022, by exploiting the simplifications that 2's complement format provides (like Yonemoto did, five years ago). Further optimizations are possible, especially if the operations are not required to execute in constant time.

John

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