from Hacker News

Efabless – Shutdown Notice

by KenoFischer on 3/1/25, 6:37 PM with 77 comments

• by kiwih on 3/1/25, 10:37 PM

  I am devastated by this news. I was lucky enough to work with Mohamed and Andy for several projects (including taping out the world's first ChatGPT-authored silicon [0]), and I've never met people more passionate about making chip design and silicon tape-out accessible to all. This is a real loss for the academic and maker communities.

  [0] https://cyber.nyu.edu/2024/07/22/chipchat-nyu-tandon-team-fa...

• by kragen on 3/1/25, 9:45 PM

  These were the Tiny Tapeout folks, right? Or am I confusing two different things? https://tinytapeout.com/ doesn't have any shutdown notices.

  Looks like yes: https://store.efabless.com/products/tiny-tapeout-project

  KenoFischer says no, Tiny Tapeout was using eFabless as their service provider and is looking into alternatives.

  Something's fishy. https://efabless.com/news doesn't list any shutdown notices.

• by sgnelson on 3/1/25, 9:33 PM

  That's a real shame.

  I haven't paid that much attention, but in my utopia, they would have received some funding from the CHIPS act just to act as a gateway for educating people on how to design and make chips. But we live here.

• by jauntywundrkind on 3/1/25, 8:43 PM

  We really need a silicon foundry model again, somewhere somehow, where folks can get experienced deigning chips.

  America's such a technology hub because of our silicon foundry, because of MOSIS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSIS

  Carver Mead & Lynn Conway got countless students & interested parties out there, making chips. Introduction to VLSI Design was a book, but also a whole practice of getting out there and doing the thing for real. So so so much innovation & creativity followed.

  Efabless felt like such a great hope that the tradition could continue, that maybe perhaps we could have a new age of newcomers also starting to make chips.

• by gchadwick on 3/2/25, 8:25 AM

  Very sad to see Efabless go. They really did offer something unique with their chipIgnite programme. It provided a simple way to get a chip made at very low cost ($10k) with no barriers. Thanks to the open source toolchain and PDK you just needed your verilog and a credit card and you were good to go. Sure it had a bunch of limitations but it was still a very encouraging development in making chip design more accessible.

  Other low-cost (at least low relative to the huge costs of silicon fabrication) services exist but typically they have little public information and will certainly require proprietary tools and PDKs (which are not cheap and require you to persuade the sales people to talk to you to even find out what these costs are).

• by mysterymath on 3/1/25, 11:24 PM

  There's something very hinky about this post. It links to efabless.com/notice, not efabless.com direcly, and there's no information about this on efabless.com proper. The title of the notice page is also "Website Title". Not to don my tinfoil hat prematurely, but might this be an attack on efabless's web hosting?

• by fourier54 on 3/1/25, 7:44 PM

  Totally expected. No business model at all. Miracle it worked for so many years.

• by chrsw on 3/2/25, 2:21 AM

  Oof. I'm not totally surprised but this is such a shame. We talk about how we want to bring more of this industry back to the US and then this news drops. Our priorities still aren't right.

• by throwaway_3133 on 3/1/25, 9:21 PM

  This is what happens when you advertise a shuttle run for "open source" designs, brazenly backdoor everybody's chips with a Management Engine (google "eFabless Caravel") and then, to top it all off, act like you can just show up at CCC and pretend everything is fine:

  https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-the-design-decisions-behind-the-...

  Video from 38c3 talk 2024-Dec-29; question at time 31min:17sec.

  This company, and its enablers (formerly) at Google, set back the progress of open source chip design by at least three full years with this bait-and-switch insanity. The people who could see through the ruse wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole; meanwhile it sucked up all the students, momentum, and funding.

  Think about what three years of progress is worth in the tech industry.

• by jbkkdoyle33 on 3/2/25, 3:30 AM

  interesting to try Grok an LLAMA instead of ChatGPT for AI generated chips not trying to compete to win jeopardy and politics. For simple digital designs the simulators are generally adequate and the bandwidth of the existing tinychips and test boards dont provide significant speed advantages. Good learning and teaching students, but not far enough along for practical product design and development. Also compare to deepseek?