An Introduction about Efabless

Welcome community members to our inaugural newsletter. In this edition and those that follow, we will bring you current on the goings on at efabless and include curated content on topics that we hope that you will find of interest. It is an exciting time in the burgeoning market for hardware innovation. IoT, wearables, drones and robots. Crowdsource, Open Source and Maker Faires. Arduino, Raspberry Pi and RISC V. We are dedicated to placing the semiconductor industry and you, our community members, in the heart of all of this by truly democratizing analog and mixed signal design and semiconductor market access.

We are excited about progress at Efabless. First of all, here is the big picture of where we are and where we are going. We currently offer the ability for a designer to register at our site and completed schematic capture for analog IP. You can upload your own IP to your directory and you can access the complete X-FAB library for the 350NM XH035 node. In the fall, the action really begins. Before the year is out, we will release analog layout, digital IP and full chip assembly functionality. In many ways, the Efabless environment already supports this capability; the trick is supporting community access. In fact, we have completed the first working silicon on our platform. The product is called Hydra. More on this in a later edition, but think community-based silicon verification of IP.

This past month we introduced a whole new category of on-line learning to our community: lab-based learning. We target professionals and graduate level students. Participants in the Efabless courses can participate in on-line labs that are integrated with the courses. Community members who successfully complete courses and labs will receive badges acknowledging proven competency in the subject matter. We are thrilled that our first offering CMOS Analog Circuit Design is authored by Professor Phillip Allen, Professor Emeritus at Georgia Tech and co-author of the widely-known textbook “CMOS Analog Circuit Design”. Please register and try it out.

We continue to grow our team at Efabless. We are pleased to announce that Tim Edwards and Greg Shaurette joined Efabless in the month of June. Tim joins Efabless from Analog Devices. Many of you may know him as the host of Open Circuit Design (http://opencircuitdesign.com). This website is the repository for the suite of open-source EDA tools including magic, qflow, and xcircuit. Tim will serve as our Senior Vice President of Analog and Platform.

Greg Shaurette brings 30 years of experience in the IT field working with global companies and entrepreneurial ventures. Greg most recently worked with Wells Fargo. Greg’s prior experience includes Bank of America; The Department of Public Health, SF; Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and American Management Systems. Greg serves as Senior Vice President in charge of our web and IT initiatives.

You can read more about Efabless in our news section, including an interesting article by Brian Bailey of SemiEngineering titled “Will Open-Source Work For Chips”. Below we want to highlight various other news stories and industry announcements that caught our eye and we think will make for great reading for you, too.