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efabless just shut down

Daniel Payne

Daniel Payne

Moderator
FYI https://efabless.com/notice

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Shutdown Notice​

Due to funding challenges, Efabless has shut down operations until further notice.
We regret any inconvenience and will provide updates as available.
 
To the Efabless community

I confirm here what many of you have already heard; the sad news of the wind down of Efabless and the layoff of our wonderful team of smart, dedicated, selfless and inspired professionals. Efabless has been dedicated since its founding to making chip creation affordable, simple and accessible to everyone. Our pillars are community, business models based on sharing of risk and reward and open source. On the brink of a wonderful next chapter, we were not able to close our Series B round and must now tend to the inevitable necessities. Our customers and partners should now have received word and how to follow up.

I choose to focus my remaining comments on the incredible accomplishments of my colleagues and our wonderful community, partners and customers.

I am thrilled with what the Efabless team accomplished and saddened to think about what it could have been. Chips can now be created for thousands of dollars not millions, and, ultimately, by millions and not thousands of people. Students from grammar school to post grad now create their own chips in an educational experience that is fun, interesting and effective. The team can be proud because they were there on the ground floor. I am thrilled by the knowledge that they will continue to lead this innovation. I am sad because it won't be at Efabless.

I offer similar sentiments to our partners. Without the support of GlobalFoundries, SkyWater, Synopsys, Google, XFAB, AFRL, Arm and many others, we would not have come this far.

And the same to our 13K plus member community. You are why we existed. You identify opportunities and issues and bring solutions. Your innovations are remarkable. You are individually incredible and, together, a force of nature.

That brings me back to the Efabless team. I am honored to have been their CEO and colleague. They are the best of the best. I won’t attempt to speak about this person or that. My words could not do justice to those I mention and would unfairly malign by omission those I do not. I do, however, want to offer profound thanks to my fellow traveler on this journey and dear friend, Mohamed Kassem. I met Mohamed in 2013 and compared visions of what could be. He outlined both a dream and a path to get there. He inspired me then and he does so to this day. He has evangelized to all of you and is the true Founding Father of this movement of empowerment.

All for now. Keep innovating, keep collaborating, keep inspiring. The world is a better place because of all of you.

With kind regards

Mike Wishart
 
Daniel Nenni said:
To the Efabless community

I confirm here what many of you have already heard; the sad news of the wind down of Efabless and the layoff of our wonderful team of smart, dedicated, selfless and inspired professionals. Efabless has been dedicated since its founding to making chip creation affordable, simple and accessible to everyone. Our pillars are community, business models based on sharing of risk and reward and open source. On the brink of a wonderful next chapter, we were not able to close our Series B round and must now tend to the inevitable necessities. Our customers and partners should now have received word and how to follow up.

I choose to focus my remaining comments on the incredible accomplishments of my colleagues and our wonderful community, partners and customers.

I am thrilled with what the Efabless team accomplished and saddened to think about what it could have been. Chips can now be created for thousands of dollars not millions, and, ultimately, by millions and not thousands of people. Students from grammar school to post grad now create their own chips in an educational experience that is fun, interesting and effective. The team can be proud because they were there on the ground floor. I am thrilled by the knowledge that they will continue to lead this innovation. I am sad because it won't be at Efabless.

I offer similar sentiments to our partners. Without the support of GlobalFoundries, SkyWater, Synopsys, Google, XFAB, AFRL, Arm and many others, we would not have come this far.

And the same to our 13K plus member community. You are why we existed. You identify opportunities and issues and bring solutions. Your innovations are remarkable. You are individually incredible and, together, a force of nature.

That brings me back to the Efabless team. I am honored to have been their CEO and colleague. They are the best of the best. I won’t attempt to speak about this person or that. My words could not do justice to those I mention and would unfairly malign by omission those I do not. I do, however, want to offer profound thanks to my fellow traveler on this journey and dear friend, Mohamed Kassem. I met Mohamed in 2013 and compared visions of what could be. He outlined both a dream and a path to get there. He inspired me then and he does so to this day. He has evangelized to all of you and is the true Founding Father of this movement of empowerment.

All for now. Keep innovating, keep collaborating, keep inspiring. The world is a better place because of all of you.

With kind regards

Mike Wishart
Click to expand...

They seem to have a good business model in the semiconductor market. I'm wondering what went wrong.

TSMC is not in the eFabless' partner list. Could that be one of the biggest problems?
 
hist78 said:
They seem to have a good business model in the semiconductor market. I'm wondering what went wrong.

TSMC is not in the eFabless' partner list. Could that be one of the biggest problems?
Click to expand...

Yes, big foundries are not a fan of open source tools. TSMC silicon verifies EDA tools and IP so customers can be assured of success. The whole trusted foundry thing. We worked with eFabless when they first started. It was fun and very educational but the revenue model just did not work. People who use open source tools do it mainly due to cost and that is a tough customer base to profit from. My opinion.
 
Daniel Nenni said:
Yes, big foundries are not a fan of open source tools. TSMC silicon verifies EDA tools and IP so customers can be assured of success. The whole trusted foundry thing. We worked with eFabless when they first started. It was fun and very educational but the revenue model just did not work. People who use open source tools do it mainly due to cost and that is a tough customer base to profit from. My opinion.
Click to expand...
The problem with open-source currently is that it is hijacked by large software and cloud companies. Even the arbiters of the open-source definition are actually mostly sponsored by those companies. The problem is that such an open source definition actually makes it very hard for small companies to survive.
 
Is there a place for the small EDA firms that specialize in a specific area that are not open source? Is open source in EDA a dead area?
 
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