bit of a tangent perhaps, not really even relevant to the article: i am really very hopeful that we will finally see the 'democratization' (is that the term?) of intergrated circuits, with projects like Google's SkyWater PDK and eFabless involvement, perhaps being a nascent seed that hopefully leads the way.<p>it really does feel to me, like the final frontier of old-style closed-source "I have $20M capital and you don't, so screw you, we make the decisions around here, and no we aren't publishing the datasheets or firmware"-world, i dare say the final holdout.<p>imagine having an actual open source raspberry pi. You can read back the github sha id from a control register of the repo checkin that was used to cook the masks that were used to etch your chip, the gdsii masks and netlists are just a build artifact, the verilog is all there. nobody asks for the HDMI controller datasheets anymore, because its just a github link away to see where the control registers live. Questions regarding the 3D accelerator are answered with a quick perusal of the verilog.<p>its so obvious that this is the future destination - atleast, to me. its just a shame that its not around <i>right now</i>. that there is all this politics and heavy beurocracy that stands in the way, understandably so - this stuff is super expensive, and the investors want a secure return on their investment. but imagine how cool that would be. to have chips become as commonplace as github projects.