alt Hacker News> Consequently, the NYU researchers’ goal is to make chip design more accessible, so nonengineers, whatever their background can create their own custom-made chips.
What?
> Consequently, the NYU researchers’ goal is to make chip design more accessible, so nonengineers, whatever their background can create their own custom-made chips.
What?
I'm just as confused as you are, honestly. It feels like we've seen the "ASIC for everything" campaign so many times over, and yet only FPGAs and CUDA typically find adoption in the industry.
A lot of my questions went away when I got to this line though:
> He’s also fully engaged in the third leg of the “democratizing chip design” stool: education.
This is a valiant effort. Chip design is a hard world to break into, and many applications that could benefit from ASICs aren't iterating or testing on it because it sucks to do. It's a lot of work to bring that skill ceiling down, but as a programmer I could see how an LLVM-style intermediate representation layer could help designers get up-and-running faster.