ℹ️ - Information / ⁉️-questions / Are plans for opening up sky90 PDK cancelled?
Between 2026-06-30 11:59 p.m. and 2026-08-01 12:00 a.m.
tnt
I wouldn't call ICSprout55 "open" ... it's about as open as a FPGA is ... you get abstracted view for the digital cells, no DRC rules or device or spice model for custom design. You have exactly what you need to do a pure digital design using only the exact cell they provide and you never get to see the actual GDS or how it's made.
They've been saying "yeah yeah it will come" but then, no changes in the past 8 months. (edited)
(assuming they aren't relying on special cased SCL marker regions for allowing patterns (e.g. due to taped-out-verified OPC tunings or such) in those cells that would not be generally legal to use, it should be feasible to extract a DRC deck from that SCL that's at least "applicable" to designs that are shaped vaguely like an SCL; main barriers I'd guess would be knowing how wide/long transistors are allowed to be and likely to some extend how aggressive latchup-prone structures can be packed, as AFAIK those are handled rather conservatively and typically not expected to be triggered by normal SCL usage.)
Chips4Makers aka Staf Verhaegen
There was a presentation from them @FSiC. It's not clear when they will actually offer tape-out capability outside their university program. (edited)
Being able to design a layout for a real process that one could go to the fab and do whatever necessary to convince them that they actually want to quote you, and then get that quote, pay, and tape out that very exact design.... that's already a massive improvement over having to sign an NDA that'll likely cover fine structure details of the resulting layout depending on how strongly they guard their DRC specifications.
1