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Open-Source & Commercial ASIC Design Flows

Open-Source PDKs: SkyWater, GF180MCU, and Beyond

A Process Design Kit (PDK) contains everything needed to design chips for a specific manufacturing process – device models, design rules, and standard cell libraries. Open-source PDKs have made it possible, for the first time, to design and fabricate real chips entirely outside the traditional commercial ecosystem.

VIDYUTT• July 30, 2026• 2 min read
Figure 1: A growing landscape of open-source PDKs enables fully open ASIC design flows on real, fabricable process nodes.
Figure 1: A growing landscape of open-source PDKs enables fully open ASIC design flows on real, fabricable process nodes.

What Open-Source PDKs Involve

SkyWater's open-source 130nm PDK, developed in partnership with Google, was among the first fully open PDKs available for real fabrication. GlobalFoundries has since released an open 180nm PDK (GF180MCU), and other foundries and organizations continue to expand the open-source PDK landscape. These PDKs include everything needed for open-source tools like OpenROAD to produce fabrication-ready designs on real, working silicon processes.

Why It Matters

Before open PDKs existed, even a fully open-source design flow was of limited practical use – there was no way to actually manufacture the resulting design without commercial, NDA-protected process information. Open PDKs close this final gap, enabling genuinely end-to-end open-source chip design, from RTL to fabricated silicon.

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