The ASIC design and manufacturing flow has for a long time been dominated by proprietary tools and processes. The growing complexity of chip-building has been reinforcing the claim that “hardware is too hard to be open source”, as the cost and time needed to build an ASIC have kept small, more agile, software-oriented teams and individuals away from the hardware domain. Thus, ASICs have not been able to benefit from the enthusiasm and collaboration which have been fuelling software development for decades now. Thanks to the continued effort of many entities which Antmicro is very proud to be among, this is now changing quickly.
Article: https://antmicro.com/blog/2020/06/skywater-open-source-pdk/