
Arm is offering early-stage startups free access to its chip designs - lihaciudaniel
https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/29/arm-is-offering-early-stage-startups-free-access-to-its-chip-designs/
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londons_explore
Hah... More importantly if you're a silicon startup and you need a CPU core
for some brand new design, you are probably not tied to a specific instruction
set.

The obvious one to choose in that case is RISCV because it already has a
working compiler and Linux port, has a thriving community, and there are no
paperwork delays to get a prototype built.

ARM is making its stuff free to try to compete with the free RISCV, in the
hope that when that startup becomes a big company, migrating to a new
architecture will prove too hard, and they'll be locked in.

~~~
Nokinside
RISC-V ISA is just a programming interface and non-physical IP.

The license fees for ARM Processor families are mostly for physical IP for
microarchitecture.

ARM provides selection of 40+ highly optimized physical processor IP cores for
different purposes. Maybe you get eventually similar selection RISC-V
architectures but they are not free. It takes lots of full time work to test
and optimize those cores. If you write processor core implementation in
verilog and give it away free you have done just 10% of the work.

~~~
zozbot234
Physical IP for up-to-date silicon fab nodes is never free. But SiFive is
already providing it for RISC-V - and other vendors could easily get involved
too, seeing as good high-level designs (that can be simulated in FPGA with
relative ease) are available with permissive licensing.

~~~
fluffything
Sure, but from the pov of a startup that needs a core, the choice is whether
you pay SiFive or similar, or ARM.

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mleonhard
This normally costs $75k/year. It's the "Entry" level of the ARM Flexible
Access program [1].

It's limited to producing one chip per year. This seems low for a startup
which needs to iterate.

They do not provide a DRAM controller. Startups will have to license one.
There is a BSD-licensed controller: LiteDRAM [2].

This ARM offering helps with the first stage of creating an SoC. It's probably
about 20% of the effort. The remaining 80% requires a lot of expertise and
expensive software and prototyping hardware. University of Washington's
Bespoke Silicon Group is developing free tools for the rest of the process:
[http://bjump.org](http://bjump.org)

[1] [https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/products/flexible-
access-...](https://www.arm.com/-/media/global/products/flexible-access-
doc/Arm-Flexible-Access-Data-Sheet.pdf?revision=0ed48fce-
bb33-43a3-804a-2b44deaa2665&la=en&hash=CF6B7355E089EF41207C0711997268B56F37A26E)

[2] [https://github.com/enjoy-digital/litedram](https://github.com/enjoy-
digital/litedram)

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webmobdev
Slightly off topic - While I broadly understand cpu architecture and
instruction sets, I've often wondered how advanced CPU / GPU chips are
actually developed and manufactured? And why are there so few major foundries,
like Intel and TSMC (the only 2 I know)?

~~~
xxpor
Chip manufacturing has the problem of being

A) incredibly difficult

B) incredibly capital intensive

C) low margin

Theres smaller fabs out there, but if you're going to do a new start up, why
would you choose to compete with these guys, unless you think youve come up
with a new process somehow that will beat them? The other fabs out there are
also part of huge companies that do lots of other stuff (Samsung) or were spun
off from them (GlobalFoundries/AMD).

IMO any new major foundry would end up being a strategic geopolitical move
with heavy subsidies rather than a pure business play.

~~~
zozbot234
Obviously this is the case wrt. the newest process nodes, but there's plenty
of older technology that's perfectly usable for some applications. Even
preferable in some cases e.g. for analog devices.

~~~
xxpor
Oh totally. But I believe OP was mostly talking about the most obvious
consumer facing stuff (phones, computers, GPUs etc)

I doubt the DIP packaged 555 timers I played with in college were using a 14
nm process :D

