Why are chip companies allergic to open source?

This argues that major semiconductor companies contribute almost no open-source chip design work compared with a few outliers, using GitHub stars as a proxy. A GitHub audit of public, non-fork chip-design repositories (Oct 11, 2026) shows Zero ASIC far outpaces everyone: 3,949 stars with roughly 10 employees (395 stars per employee). By contrast SiFive has 1,949 stars and ~500 employees (3.9 per employee), while NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel register thousands of stars but at vanishingly low stars per employee (NVIDIA 3,376/42,000 ≈ 0.08; AMD 2,294/31,000 ≈ 0.07; Intel 1,723/85,100 ≈ 0.02). The write-up frames this gap as a moral and practical failure of the trillion-dollar chip industry to support open-source infrastructure even though corporate contributions historically enabled major software ecosystems.

The methodology focused strictly on chip-design artifacts (RTL, HLS-to-RTL, EDA tools, PDKs, testbenches), excluded SDKs, runtimes and board files, and hand-reviewed 121 qualifying repositories out of 7,495 starred entries. Zero ASIC’s stars derive from specific projects (OH! Verilog library 1,442; SiliconCompiler 1,230; Switchboard 324; UMI 170, etc.). Bluespec is the next notable contributor among startups; many well-funded AI-chip vendors publish only SDKs or demos, not chip-design repos. The author notes possible omissions, lists counting rules (organizations, headcounts, exclusions), and highlights non-chip organizations like Precision Innovations and Antmicro that nonetheless drive major open-source chip projects.