Democratization of EDA : Still Hope for Mankind

Looks like the Europeans are on it. Following in Clifford (now Claire) Wolf's footsteps is a silent army toiling away.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q03KLgdFQ0I (Matthew Venn, GNU Radio)

https://bit.ly/grcon21-yosyshq

And Google seems to be helping. Need to find out more about this SkyWater PDK thing. Is it truly open-source and does it let lay-people do analog design without access to Cadence or something you have to pay for?

So, like Linus Torvalds was able to make something out of N, maybe Matthias Köfferlein and the Toped folks will give us the next Yosys.

What is the problem? The platforms are super expensive. Consider the case of looking for bottlenecks in your metal routing (you want your metal traces to carry a certain amount of current, meaning they have to be at least X thick. So, X, XX, X is ok, but X, x, X is not. How do you look for this? Can you post this on Upwork? No, because the layout is contained in Cadence and the tool you use to manipulate it uses Cadence's proprietary SKILL (lisp-like) programming language. So, a freelancer does not have access to a development environment that lets him test her solution.