NativeLink has become a critical architectural component for companies developing custom silicon. From the outset, our mission was to build an open-source simulation platform designed to scale with cutting-edge client technologies and cater to the needs of pioneering industries like autonomous robotics. These innovators have increasingly sought alternatives to proprietary solutions for design simulation, leveraging NativeLink for direct hardware access, no garbage collection, considerable infrastructure cost reduction, and high-fidelity test environments. And now, with the proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and Nvidia’s monopolistic dominance in advanced computing, NativeLink has garnered significant interest from an unexpected sector: semiconductors.
This shift is fueled by the proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and Nvidia’s dominance in advanced computing, which have driven the development of new semiconductor technologies aimed at addressing supply-side challenges. Among the most promising advancements driving the development of new semiconductor technologies are:
While these innovations hold transformative potential across industries from computing to healthcare, the legacy tools dominating electronic design automation (EDA)—such as Cadence, Ansys, and Synopsys—have anchored the space as billion-dollar leaders in EDA, ripe for smaller but hopefully valuable new integrations with their established, proprietary workflows.
The rising demand for compute power has outpaced the silicon industry’s ability to deliver. To address this, Google developed the “Open Silicon” strategy, incorporating open-source technologies such as LLVM, XLS, OpenRoad, and Bazel. The traditional silicon design workflow—spanning RTL design, synthesis, and place-and-route—has historically relied on disparate, proprietary tools, creating inefficiencies in iteration and maintenance.
By integrating these workflows into a Bazel-managed ecosystem, NativeLink enables a streamlined, deterministic approach. Using Bazel build rules written in Starlark, users can manage each design stage as version-controlled code within a monorepo, leveraging open-source tools for greater transparency, customizability, and collaboration.
NativeLink’s Rust foundation ensures reliability by minimizing race conditions, which are often identified at compile time. Coupled with Nix as a dependency manager, the platform provides a hermetic environment with fine-grained control over pinned dependencies. This approach contrasts with many legacy tools and emerging competitors that rely on garbage-collected languages, introducing nondeterministic behavior.
Open-source tools such as Verilog, Bazel, Verilator, rules_hdl, and OpenRoad have set the stage for a new generation of silicon providers. RISC-V is new and not for everyone, but it’s a glimpse into the opening world of semiconductors. By adopting an open source, instruction set architecture, companies can eliminate licensing fees and leverage modular design benefits. NativeLink furthers this modularity, breaking each system component into self-contained modules that foster maintainability and extensibility. For more details, explore our GitHub repository.
NativeLink’s remote execution and caching capabilities are expanding rapidly, empowering innovators to explore the potential of open-source tools in semiconductor design. As industries push the boundaries of technology, we’re committed to enabling breakthroughs with flexible, scalable, and deterministic infrastructure tools that engineers can rely on.