For the first time, open silicon wasn’t just a niche experiment in 2025 - it was a real ecosystem spanning three fabs and thousands of designs. And then one company collapsed and hundreds of chips effectively disappeared overnight.

Efabless going out of business at the end of February hit the community like a hammer. They weren’t just an MPW provider - they offered hundreds of packaged parts with no NDAs, great pricing, and a level of openness that was rare in silicon. Losing them left hundreds of designs, including 500 Tiny Tapeout projects from TT08 and TT09, seemingly stuck in fabrication limbo.

Wow what a year! In this post I’m going to look back over 2024 and share some of my highlights and the goals I met and failed. Then I’ll share my ambitions and predictions for 2025.

With all the open source tapeouts, events, workshops and news, there’s a ton to cover - so let’s jump in!

I aimed for 2000 new people to get started with open source silicon via my courses and tiny tapeout.

Hi and happy new year! Welcome to my year in review post of 2023. We’ll revisit the biggest moments of open source semiconductors, the goals I failed and those I met, and set some new ones for 2024!

So, let’s start with the biggest news of 2023.

Last year saw the end of the Google sponsored lottery shuttles. We were expecting around another 8 shuttles for sky130, GF180 and the start of sky90. The last shuttle was GFMPW1, which closed late last year and the Sky 130 PDK is now in the safe hands of the chips alliance.

Welcome to my highlights from 2022! It was a big year for open-source silicon, especially the Zero to ASIC course and Tiny Tapeout. Let’s look at some of the highlights and then some aims for 2023.

Here are a few of the highlights:

• Four Zero to ASIC course tapeouts: MPW5, MPW6, MPW7, and MPW8
• Rolled out Tiny Tapeout 1 and 2, helping nearly 250 people tapeout their designs,
• I personally submitted my 19th tapeout
• Presented and hosted a Tiny Tapeout workshop at the Hackaday SuperCon in Novemeber 2022. Met tons of people, including Sam Zeloof @szeloof.
• YouTube Channel had 82k views and 2.5k new subscribers
• Introduced Siliwiz

Zero to ASIC course Tapeouts

The Zero to ASIC course continued to grow, we now have 280 students and made submissions to four multi-project wafers (MPW).