[Arm-netbook] OT: Food for thought

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Sat, Jul 6, 2019 at 3:49 AM David Niklas <doark at mail.com> wrote:

> > It looks like there are some quantum interferences as well as EM and RF
> > issues, *and* probably some power and layout issues in the tinier
> > geometries, all of which the Foundries absolutely do not want the
> > customers to know about, because it constitues "reverse engineerable
> > knowledge" about how the Foundry lays out the chips, and a competitor
> > Foundry could get hold of that and start their own multi billion dollar
> > money spinner.
>
> Here's where closed source IP really confuses me: If a "money spinner"
> tried to do that wouldn't they be sued, pay royalties and regret it for
> the rest of their existences?

 in the meantime, whilst such a court case is underway, they're losing
literally billions due to the upstart having "stolen" their knowledge.
a CSMC employee actually did that to TSMC: worked on TSMC's 28nm line,
went back to China and started CSMC's 28nm line with the knowledge.

 it took years for the court case to go through, as it's in a
different international jurisdiction.


> > Bottom line is, we're literally decades and hundreds of millions of
> > dollars away from libre foundries.  I am probably out on those
> > estimates by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude.
>
> Are we talking any libre foundry, or some particular nm size (not that a
> nm is actually used to describe a nm anymore)?

 outside of my ability to say.

> > Luckily, DARPA recognises the problem and put up USD 150m to create
> > fully libre automated ASIC layout software. It's a start.
>
> Interesting. For posterity, here's a link (with HTML garbage removed):
> https://www.fbo.gov/index?id=a32e37cfad63edcba7cfd5d997422d93

 that is (was) a session link, now invalid.  what keywords did you use?

l.