Democratizing Chip Design - Naja

“Open source EDA (Electronic Design Automation) can be a game changer when it comes to building a more resilient and accessible chip ecosystem”, says Christophe Alexandre. Together with Noam Cohen he created Naja, an open source EDA tool.

The semiconductor industry is highly complex and globally interconnected, which makes it fragile. Open source can contribute to resiliency in what traditionally has been a closed field.

Christophe: “Open source EDA tools make it easier for newcomers to get started by providing solid, accessible foundations that don’t require massive initial investment or deep legacy knowledge, and it can bridge chip design with other fast moving fields like machine learning and AI. It can accelerate the creation of a local semiconductor ecosystem by breaking down the traditional barriers and opening up innovation. So trying to grow a new EDA ecosystem in Europe just by using the old closed and behind the gates model just doesn’t seem realistic anymore. If we want to build something resilient, open source needs to be a core part of the strategy.”

Links
Naja
Naja Github
Naja Pyhton
Naja documentation

NGI Zero projects
Naja
Naja-DNL

Learn more about Naja:
Christophe at FOSDEM 25 about Naja Python

Other projects and topics mentioned
Yosys
Coriolis
OpenROAD
Klayout
IHP Open source PDK
TinyTapeout

NGI Zero is a coalition of non-profit organizations lead by NLnet. It provides financial and practical support to people working on the free and open internet. You can find us on @[e-mail] & @[e-mail]. NGI Zero is made possible with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative.

The podcast is hosted by Ronny Lam and Tessel Renzenbrink, the jingle created by Yarmo Mackenbach, all from NLnet.

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