[Magic-dev] Re: A question on technology files

[Svenn Are Bjerkem]

On Friday 10 November 2006 19:00, R. Timothy Edwards wrote:
> The foundries keep very close watch on the most advanced technologies
> such as 65nm and below.  I am quite certain that you will not find
> anything in the public domain.  For example, I'm told by a friend of
> mine who is a professor at U.C. Santa Cruz that another professor in
> the EE department there posted the TSMC design rules on the class
> website, and now the entire department is banned from using MOSIS.

I was told by somebody who has been in the business for some years that the 
current and the previous "node" are kind of business secret and do differ a 
bit between the foundries. Older nodes tend to converge towards 
compatibility. Signing NDA's may be nescessary in many cases. Putting things 
on web-sites is most likely violating both license agreement and copyright 
even if it is a university intranet.

>
> This is not to say that I *agree* that design rules should not be
> publicly distributed, because I think that foundries could not
> possibly lose any business thereby, and stand to gain a lot, not
> to mention univerities, small companies, and the world in general.
> But you have to tread carefully where the damn lawyers are involved.

I suspect that big players in the EDA software business like to have an 
advantage on other tool vendors and have some kind of agreement with the 
foundries about who get what for whatever purpose. I also guess that it is a 
wish from the foundry side to have a reduced need to support a pletora of 
tools that deliver gds to them. Just look at Gerber for PCB industry. While a 
clean standard is missing, several PCB manufacturers deliver their own tools 
to avoid problems.

-- 
Svenn