Open Hardware Infrastructure Works
A speculative institution design for permanent open chip design infrastructure
Every public AI project, climate sensor effort, and medical device lab hits the same hidden barrier: the tools to design chips are controlled by a few gatekeepers. We built a digital economy on open software infrastructure. The hardware underneath remains locked behind proprietary walls.
The divergence
Open-source software became foundational infrastructure through a proven pattern: communities demonstrated technical merit, then institutions provided professional support that transformed grassroots projects into backbone infrastructure. Companies collaborate on shared layers while competing on products.
74%[1]
EDA (electronic design automation) market controlled by three companies
Each layer has distinct access barriers, but all share the same fundamental problem: hardware infrastructure functions like a private utility with no public alternative.
The chips we cannot design
Open hardware products exist. You can build climate sensors and medical devices with off-the-shelf components, open PCBs, Arduino, ESP32. But you cannot design custom silicon for these applications. The infrastructure barrier blocks chip-level innovation, forcing everything onto generic consumer silicon.
The tragedy is not expensive chips. It is the chips we never get to build.
Partial solutions are not enough
RISC-V demonstrates both the potential and the limitations of current approaches. As an open instruction set architecture, RISC-V enables anyone to design processors without licensing fees. But designing a RISC-V chip still requires expensive proprietary EDA tools, access to restricted foundries, and navigation of complex intellectual property regimes. The instruction set is open; the infrastructure to use it remains closed.
OpenROAD, a DARPA-funded project to create open-source EDA tools, has made impressive technical progress but struggles with the last-mile problem: getting from research demonstration to production-ready infrastructure that companies will trust for million-dollar tape-outs (sending a finished design to a foundry for manufacturing). The jump from technically possible to production viable requires sustained investment at scales that neither volunteer communities nor academic grants can sustain.
The proposal: OHIW
What is needed is not another consortium with membership fees. It is a permanent institution modelled on how infrastructure historically gets built: public investment creating commons that enable broad participation and economic activity, then transitioning to self-sustainability through service revenue rather than rent extraction.
An Open Hardware Infrastructure Works could operate like the institutions that emerged for open-source software: permanent professional operations building and maintaining infrastructure as commons. It would employ engineers as career positions with competitive salaries and long-term job security.
Core deliverables
- Production-grade open EDA toolchain, from RTL (hardware description) to GDSII (the file format sent to fabrication)
- Open PDKs (process design kits — the recipes that translate designs into manufacturing instructions) and foundry access coordination
- Public fabrication capacity
- Verification, security, and certification infrastructure
- Training and workforce development
For hardware infrastructure, the same logic that worked for software could apply. Companies need EDA software to design chips, but these tools are not their competitive advantage; their chip designs are. Open hardware infrastructure would enable the same separation: shared tools and processes, competitive products, broadened participation in technological sovereignty.
Financing and governance
One possibility: OHIW could capitalise through public infrastructure bonds with 20-30 year maturities, following a centuries-old pattern. Governments would guarantee the bonds, treating chip design and manufacturing infrastructure like other public goods essential to economic activity and strategic sovereignty.
Term sheet
| Element | Detail |
|---|---|
| Instrument | Government-guaranteed infrastructure bonds |
| Maturity | 20-30 years |
| Scale | Several billion dollars over the first decade |
| Revenue pledge | Support contracts, certification, MPW coordination, foundry partnerships |
| Mission covenant | Open licensing for designated outputs; non-discriminatory access |
| Access model | Core infrastructure freely accessible; revenue from enhanced services |
The public investment would be smaller than the private rent extraction it could eliminate.
Revenue model
As the infrastructure matures, bonds are repaid through service revenue:
- Professional support contracts: guaranteed response times, priority fixes, dedicated engineering, following the Red Hat/SUSE/Canonical model around freely accessible software
- Training and certification: as open EDA tools become industry standards, certification programmes expand the skilled workforce while generating revenue
- Manufacturing coordination: multi-project wafer services and foundry access at cost-plus margins, revenue from logistics rather than artificial scarcity
- Foundry partnerships: operating or partnering in foundries using open PDKs, with process documentation remaining in the commons
Revenue never gates access to core infrastructure. EDA tools remain freely downloadable. Design platforms remain openly accessible. PDK documentation stays open.
Governance
A tripartite commons governance model balances power so no single constituency can capture the institution.
Precedents
None of this is without precedent. Patient public capital building shared infrastructure that enables broad economic activity is one of the oldest patterns in institutional design.
Dutch Water Boards
Established as early as 1323, financed dyke construction through perpetual bonds. Bonds issued in 1648 still pay interest over 375 years later.
CERN
2,500 staff maintaining research infrastructure as commons. Treaty-based. Multi-decade continuity. Produced the World Wide Web as a side effect.
ESA / Airbus
European aerospace sovereignty through coordinated public investment. Nations that could not individually compete built shared industrial capacity.
Internet (DARPA/NSF)
Long-term government investment, not venture capital. TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS became commons that enabled rather than extracted rent from the digital economy.
GPS
Government-funded infrastructure made freely available globally. Economic value created vastly exceeds what licensing could have captured.
Autobahn GmbH
Mission-locked publicly owned company. 10,000+ staff. Inalienable public ownership, no third-party participation. Infrastructure at scale.
The more fundamental question
Open hardware infrastructure addresses the institutional problem: who controls the tools, who sets the terms, who can participate. But it does not address a harder question. The semiconductor industry depends on minerals from the majority world, billion-dollar fabrication, and labour exploitation. Is computation as currently conceived separable from these harms?
About this work
This research was developed during the 2025 SOAM residency RE:FUND Our Digital Future — Reimagining Funding Architectures for Public Interest Technology.
Published writing: How Can Open Hardware Catch Up With Open Source Software? and Building a Digital Sovereignty Castle in the Sky.
Get in touch
If you are working on open hardware infrastructure, chip sovereignty, or public interest technology and want to discuss any of this further, reach out.