Google Partners US Government To Develop Open Source Chips

The US Commerce Department and Alphabet’s Google has reached a co-operative research and development agreement, to produce chips that researchers and startups can use to develop new nanotechnology and semiconductor devices.

According to the announcement, Google will essentially finance the initial cost of setting up production and will subsidise the first production run of the chips, which will be manufactured by SkyWater Technology at its Bloomington, Minnesota, semiconductor foundry.

Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but the deal was signed between Google and the US Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Open source chips

NIST, alongside its university research partners (the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland, George Washington University, Brown University and Carnegie Mellon University), will design the circuitry for the chips.

The circuit designs will be open source, allowing academic and small business researchers to use the chips without restriction or licensing fees.

“By creating a new and affordable domestic supply of chips for research and development, this collaboration aims to unleash the innovative potential of researchers and startups across the nation,” said Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and NIST Director Laurie E. Locascio.

It authorises funding aimed at jump-starting the domestic production of semiconductors in response to supply-chain disruptions.

Locascio noted that this collaboration with Google had been planned before the recent passage of the US Chips and Science Act.

“This is a great example of how government, industry and academic researchers can work together to enhance US leadership in this critically important industry,” Locascio concluded.

200-millimeter wafers

The Commerce Department pointed out that modern microelectronic devices are made of components that are stacked like layers in a cake, with the bottom layer being a semiconductor chip.

It said that the NIST/Google collaboration will make available a bottom-layer chip with specialised structures for measuring and testing the performance of the components placed on top of it, including new kinds of memory devices, nanosensors, bioelectronics and advanced devices needed for artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

NIST apparently anticipates designing as many as 40 different chips optimised for different applications.

And because the chip designs will be open source, researchers will be able to pursue new ideas without restriction and share data and device designs freely.

“Google has a long history of leadership in open-source,” said Will Grannis, CEO of Google Public Sector. “Moving to an open-source framework fosters reproducibility, which helps researchers from public and private institutions iterate on each other’s work. It also democratises innovation in nanotechnology and semiconductor research.”

The SkyWater foundry will produce the chips in the form of 200-millimeter discs of patterned silicon wafers, which universities and other purchasers can then dice into thousands of individual chips at their own processing facilities.