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Python2020–2020
ucb-bar / hammer

hammer

Hammer: Highly Agile Masks Made Effortlessly from RTL

2Distinct people
2Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
330GitHub stars
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Hammer: Highly Agile Masks Made Effortlessly from RTL

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by hour2 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-07-07 09:21:58 UTC to 2020-07-07 15:44:27 UTC.

012020-07-07 09:00:00 UTC to 2020-07-07 10:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsJul 7, 09:002020-07-07 10:00:00 UTC to 2020-07-07 11:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-07-07 11:00:00 UTC to 2020-07-07 12:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-07-07 12:00:00 UTC to 2020-07-07 13:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsJul 7, 12:002020-07-07 13:00:00 UTC to 2020-07-07 14:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-07-07 14:00:00 UTC to 2020-07-07 15:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-07-07 15:00:00 UTC to 2020-07-07 16:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsJul 7, 15:00

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Jul 7, 09:002020-07-07 09:00:00 UTC2020-07-07 10:00:00 UTC101
Jul 7, 10:002020-07-07 10:00:00 UTC2020-07-07 11:00:00 UTC000
Jul 7, 11:002020-07-07 11:00:00 UTC2020-07-07 12:00:00 UTC000
Jul 7, 12:002020-07-07 12:00:00 UTC2020-07-07 13:00:00 UTC000
Jul 7, 13:002020-07-07 13:00:00 UTC2020-07-07 14:00:00 UTC000
Jul 7, 14:002020-07-07 14:00:00 UTC2020-07-07 15:00:00 UTC000
Jul 7, 15:002020-07-07 15:00:00 UTC2020-07-07 16:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

2 sources
There is an open PR adding support for the OpenROAD tools [^1]. So, there should be a flow that uses open source VLSI tools eventually. The Google 130nm library is still filling a huge gap as all the open PDKs up to this point were "fake" educational libraries, e.g., FreePDK [^2]. You can run them through the a VLSI flow, but you can't tape them out. [^1]: https://github.com/ucb-bar/hammer/pull/584 [^2]: https://www.eda.ncsu.edu/wiki/FreePDK
In Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips
IIRC there are a couple ways to produce the intended design. At the end of the day, fabs often take layouts in the GDSII format, which is documented and open. The Klayout open source visualizer is industry-standard in my experience. Now, how do you generate these layouts? It depends on what you are doing. If more on the experimental side of things, writing scripts to generate structures is fine, as long as these conform to the fab-provided design rules. Technically, that's still what everyone is doing at the industrial level, except the scripts -- often written in tcl -- are provided by the fab. Now if you have some FPGA experience, you are probably interested in logic synthesis tools. There are a few ones, I've seen some academic with their own place-and-route stage, for instance. https://open-src-soc.org/program.html#T-CHAPUT does that,
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I think. The slides linked above outline one of the possible ways to do this: leverage chisel ( https://www.chisel-lang.org/) and the FIRRTL intermediate representation for RTL description. A few tools can ingest the output and try to come up with a layout. Hammer (https://github.com/ucb-bar/hammer) is such a tool, but I don't think that PDK is available with it just yet. To be honest, I don't think commercial tools are that advanced, and it would be fairly doable to catch up. There is some interesting work in this field, but since fabbing is expensive, it tends to be more within the academic community than the free software one. I'd look for papers, not on Github, though that's slowly changing. The chip design world is a slow beast to turn around: everything in the fabrication process is optimized to maximize yield, hence very little leeway is allowed: "If it ain't broken, don't fix it" is the motto, for good reason: if changing humidity levels 0.2% can make a fab lose millions; they won't try to use new and experimental software. I'm watching this space, notably with Verilog alternatives such as Migen. The open source community starts to embrace FPGA, wich is already great. I wish more manufacturers opened up their bitstream, so maybe we need an open FPGA? Though this free fabbing offer would be a great fit for Wi-Fi chips, I think. I wonder if People at openwifi (https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi) are interested? I hope that gives a few interesting pointers to whoever reads this :)
In Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

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