HydraChess
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Vivado is Xilinx synthesis, place and route and target bit stream generator combined with a HDL editor. In the past it was called Xilinx ISE. This is STILL a FPGA and CPLD specific tool. Still a PLD / PLA tool. Actual silicon targetting tools and standard cell based ASIC tools are much more expensive and much highly protected.In context of my project I don't know what is a validation tool but from what I know the Xilinx software called Vivado used to program Xilinx FPGAs costs around five lakhs and the FPGA board itself ranges from more than a lakh to 10 lakhs depending on the sophistication and facilities on the board.
As I said, these are only PLA/PLD tools. They are useless without your prototyping board. So they are not locked down that hard.startup company that designs a processor will not need more than one installation of that software and not more than one board. I am sure there are enough installations of Xilinx FPGAs locked into enough Xilinx Vivado softwares in China and this would be for prototyping and I think these installations can be disconnected from the internet to prevent Xilinx from disabling the software.
Well, here is the basic problem.The actual chip could be, as I said, produced in non-silicon forms or non-fully-silicon forms like graphene and photonics which China is researching on and for these the software tools for production needs will of course have to be adopted from open source means or developed anew.
<High Level Description> -> Gate Level Description -> Transistor Net-List -> Geometry on Chip.
This transformation will still apply. You can not prevent it. All of this requires tools. "High level" can be HDLs or more common these days, behavioral synthesis technologies. All of these are dominated by American companies. If they ban you, you are dead in water.
Yes, they will be. What will change will be their geometries on new material and inter-connect. But there are only these may ways in which you can realize a PCI bus or AMBA bus or a SRAM block. Those are fixed. You will need those in your foundry's library of basic blocks.But what are the IP libraries you speak of and will they be applicable in a production environment where the materials and paradigms are different ?
Does not matter how you make a transistor, you will still have to create a bus or a SRAM block out of it. A foundry like TSMC has a library of thousands of such blocks so user can just instantiate it in their design and they do not have to place and route every single component again and again for each customer.Please read this article about a NASA research as of 2014 about bringing back of the vacuum tube transistor concept to nano scale miniaturization which the research found the transistor resistant to radiation and to work ( switch ) at 460 GHz ! Seems this transistor has to be fabricated using MEMS fabrication technique so it is possible that the software toolchain will need to be customized to this in addition to using open source software.