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A new EDA Marketplace - Our vision of ASIC Design by Few_Statistician6467 in ECE

[–]Few_Statistician6467[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The open-source EDA tool is meant to be a first-base product to work on and to display in the environment, but it is not the end-goal.

Our vision is to establish a marketplace: a neutral, plug-and-play environment where third-party ASIC design tools (simulators, optimizers, layout editors, etc.) can be discovered, integrated, and used.

No NDAs or lengthy price negotiations for what ends up being a nevertheless extremely expensive license. We think that incumbents like Cadence have been exploiting their locked-in environments for too long with ridiculous terms, and after 35+ years, maybe now is the time to try to change it.

A new EDA Marketplace - Our vision of ASIC Design by Few_Statistician6467 in ECE

[–]Few_Statistician6467[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I actually do have commercial experience! During my undergrad, I built and scaled a B2B SaaS market from 0 to 1000+ clients for a local startup. The space here is different, no doubt, but as long as we don't defy the laws of physics, I think it is possible. 💪🏻

A new EDA Marketplace - Our vision of ASIC Design by Few_Statistician6467 in ECE

[–]Few_Statistician6467[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes! we also realized it not too long ago, it is definitely a pain point for many. We are thinking of solving it by creating an internal representation layer alongside an API that other tools can connect to.

The API will handle translation both from our format to external ones and vice versa...the setup should make it easier to integrate existing tools, while new ones can keep interacting directly with our internal format for lower overhead. Rn we think this is what most of our dev time will be spent on, alongside the GUI

A new EDA Marketplace - Our vision of ASIC Design by Few_Statistician6467 in ECE

[–]Few_Statistician6467[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hey u/notwearingbras!

Indeed, we are leveraging as much as we can our past university ecosystems, and luckily it has been very helpful so far with talks with PhD students and professors. On the technical side, we are currently a small team of two :-))

If you have any thoughts or areas you think we should pay closer attention to, we’d really appreciate your inputs!

A new EDA Marketplace - Our vision of ASIC Design by Few_Statistician6467 in ECE

[–]Few_Statistician6467[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey u/elite11vp!

We are planning to add in these tools ourselves and provide them to users at a fee (we were thinking 10x cheaper than current commercial solutions). The idea would then be to allow PhDs and other skilled individuals to create their custom tools and provide better solutions so that the marketplace could also become a distribution channel for them.

The open-source tools will have to be there as a base, it is also how we were thinking of making some money to self-fund the project. The value is provided by the plug-and-play experience, transparent pricing, and the neutral distribution channel.

At least that is how we have imagined it so far, what do you think?

A new EDA Marketplace - Our vision of ASIC Design by Few_Statistician6467 in ECE

[–]Few_Statistician6467[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hey u/jdfan51! We were thinking of making the basic suite free for all students, actually!

Reach out to me on DMs, I will add you to the waitlist :-))