efabless corporation, an online design platform and marketplace for community-developed intellectual property (IP) and integrated circuits (ICs), today introduced Chiplicity, an open source framework for community members to create, share, make derivatives of and commercialize mixed-signal ICs.

“Chiplicity is a first of its kind and extends the efabless electronics community engineering concept from IP to ICs,” affirms Mohamed Kassem, efabless’ co-founder and chief technology officer. “We make chip design and productizing chips simple and broadly accessible. That’s why we call it Chip-licity.”

efabless developed Chiplicity as a development kit for integrated circuits, similar to hardware or software design kits known as HDKs or SDKs. Chiplicity includes all the tools needed for a full design cycle to design, verify, validate and prototype mixed-signal products, from idea to completed manufacturable GDSII files. It offers the efabless global community of IC designers a set of related library components –– an open source chip called Hydra, analog IP ready to wire, a standardized pad frame and a serial interface (SPI). A soft variant of the PicoRV32 RISC-V CPU core, developed by open source active contributor Clifford Wolf, is part of the efabless digital library located in the beta version of CloudV.

Community members clone marketplace components into their personal workspace on the efabless MyLib repository and create new designs. Final designs can be promoted to the marketplace for sharing with others and community members can manufacture their designs as prototypes through efabless on shuttles at X-FAB. To date, the Chiplicity platform has been used internally to tapeout two ICs.

Over time, community members will be able to create and verify increasingly complex mixed-signal ASICs. Chiplicity will offer a flexible pad frame generator and additional analog and digital IP, including a variety of microprocessor cores, additional open source IP and community-developed analog IP blocks. efabless also will offer open source test boards as library components to validate custom analog circuit designs.

Community members will be able to share designs under proprietary or open source licenses. efabless currently supports X-FAB’s XH035, 350 nm nanometer (nm) mixed-signal process. Its technology roadmap includes support for additional foundry processes, such as 180nm and 130nm nodes.

“Chiplicity is an essential piece of the overall ‘smart’ hardware, open innovation ecosystem,” remarks Mike Wishart, efabless’ co-founder and chief executive officer. “By combining community, open source and an innovative marketplace, we connect ideas with resources and apply a risk/reward sharing financial model that is unique to the IC industry. IC entrepreneurs can create new mixed-signal designs on limited budgets and ‘smart’ product inventors can find customized IC solutions to make their ideas commercially attractive.”

To learn more about Chiplicity, visit: https://chiplicity.io/

About efabless

efabless.com is the world’s first semiconductor community engineering platform, connecting a global community of mixed signal architects, designers and engineers with IC, foundry and OEM customers. It provides community members with everything required to define, develop and monetize their IP and IC designs. efabless applies the principles of open innovation –– community and open source – to make customized, on-demand mixed signal electronics affordable, accessible and creative. The efabless community spans approximately 1,300 members from more than 30 countries around the world. For information visit: www.efabless.com

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