A classic divide in European and American approaches to open source. Europe signs a petition and loudly declares a need, while the US has quietly funded all the major open source work in the field since 2018 [1]
All it takes to check your point is to scroll down to the end and follow the link at the bottom of the page to the FOSSI foundation, who hosted this open letter, to realize that they have also developed some widely used EDA tools. Here's a link on case you have missed it
Which of those "projects" do you imagine is an EDA tool? Cocotb is at least a tool, not a newsletter or a mailing list, and used in the hardware space, it probably comes the closest.
Actually, the most important and essential tools in open source EDA are fundamentally being developed in Europe (e.g. klayout (Munich), yosys (Vienna), nextpnr (Vienna/Heidelberg), ngspice (Duisburg)). Without them openroad wouldn't even exist. When it comes to open source PDK, one of the few existing ones is being developed since almost two years at the IHP in Germany. An ongoing funding call that you might not be aware of (https://www.bmbf.de/bmbf/shareddocs/bekanntmachungen/de/2023...) will host a number of additional projects that will start in May this year. Good projects are constantly being developed also within https://nlnet.nl/ for example.
I'd say the classic divide here is not a lack of development or funding but a lack of advertisement and swag on the European side -- as always.
Comments
A classic divide in European and American approaches to open source. Europe signs a petition and loudly declares a need, while the US has quietly funded all the major open source work in the field since 2018 [1]
[1]: https://theopenroadproject.org/
All it takes to check your point is to scroll down to the end and follow the link at the bottom of the page to the FOSSI foundation, who hosted this open letter, to realize that they have also developed some widely used EDA tools. Here's a link on case you have missed it
https://fossi-foundation.org/our-work/projects
Which of those "projects" do you imagine is an EDA tool? Cocotb is at least a tool, not a newsletter or a mailing list, and used in the hardware space, it probably comes the closest.
Actually, the most important and essential tools in open source EDA are fundamentally being developed in Europe (e.g. klayout (Munich), yosys (Vienna), nextpnr (Vienna/Heidelberg), ngspice (Duisburg)). Without them openroad wouldn't even exist. When it comes to open source PDK, one of the few existing ones is being developed since almost two years at the IHP in Germany. An ongoing funding call that you might not be aware of (https://www.bmbf.de/bmbf/shareddocs/bekanntmachungen/de/2023...) will host a number of additional projects that will start in May this year. Good projects are constantly being developed also within https://nlnet.nl/ for example.
I'd say the classic divide here is not a lack of development or funding but a lack of advertisement and swag on the European side -- as always.
Also https://fas.org/publication/open-source-hardware/