/platform

SoC. SoM.
Board. System.

A custom chip rarely ships alone. We design across the full ladder — from the die at the bottom to the product at the top — so each layer makes sense in the next.

Tier 1
SoC
System on Chip

A single integrated die. CPU or MCU cores, memory, peripherals, and accelerators on one piece of silicon — the smallest unit that runs your design.

Looks like

Joule M5, Apple M-series, an iCE40, a sky130 chipIgnite tape-out.

Where openWafer fits

JLandauer + Foundry. Design the die in the browser, route the tapeout to any open or accessible foundry.

Tier 2
SoM
System on Module

A small carrier PCB that wraps the die in everything it needs to boot — RAM, power management, clock, debug pins, mounting interface. Designed to drop into many different host boards without redesign.

Looks like

Raspberry Pi Compute Module, Coral Edge TPU SoM, the Feather-class carriers we ship.

Where openWafer fits

Reference catalog. Module designs that take a die from "tape-out" to "soldered, powered, talking to the bus" without redoing the work each time.

Tier 3
Board
Carrier or application PCB

The board the SoM (or SoC) lives on. Application-specific: connectors, sensors, antennas, displays, batteries, mechanical mounting. Where the chip stops being abstract and starts being a product.

Looks like

Raspberry Pi 5, OpenBCI Cyton, an EVK dev kit, a custom medical patch PCB.

Where openWafer fits

Design Services. We design the carrier when you bring a die or a SoM and need it integrated.

Tier 4
System
The product

Mechanicals, firmware, app, retail packaging, certification, the box on the shelf. Where the silicon stops mattering as silicon and starts mattering as something a person uses.

Looks like

A smart ring, a sensor patch, a satellite payload, a desktop instrument, a robot.

Where openWafer fits

Design Services + partners. Full-stack engagements where the chip is one part of a larger product effort.

A design-guide philosophy.

A few principles we apply whenever we move up the ladder.

Design from math, not market.

Start from the primitive operations your application actually needs — addition, MAC, MVM, FFT, tanh, ADC, photon detection — and pick the substrate where each one is cheapest in energy and area. Markets reorganize around hardware, not the other way around.

One die, many products.

A die is expensive to spin and cheap to reuse. Design it so the same silicon can ship in an MCU module, a sensor patch, a desktop instrument, and a rack card — the carrier changes, the die doesn't.

Feather is the default carrier.

A Feather-class board is the smallest credible product unit — pocket-sized, pin-headered, harvestable-powered, distributable through Digi-Key. Every new die we design ships in a Feather first; everything else is downstream of that.

Each layer makes sense in the next.

Heat budget, power, mechanicals, certifications, connectors — they all flow upward through the ladder. A choice at the SoC layer ripples through the SoM, the Board, the System. We design every layer with the next two in mind.

No chip is a lesser chip.

A 50¢ sensor ASIC and a $5M rack accelerator share the same primitive set — the difference is surface area, parallelism, and packaging, not capability. We aim every die at every tier from the start.

Ship complete.

A SoC without a SoM, a SoM without a board, a board without firmware — each is just a milestone, not a product. We finish through the ladder, or we don't pretend we shipped.

Roadmap.

Where the platform stands today, and where each tier is heading.

SoC
Live
JLandauer cloud IDE with Yosys synthesis against the open PDKs. Foundry routing to 15 directly-orderable shuttles.
SoC
Next
Full place & route in JLandauer, DRC + LVS round-trip, persistent projects, consortium-PDK access for AIM Photonics.
SoM
Next
Feather-class carrier reference designs in the catalog, parameterised for the chiplets coming out of JLandauer.
Board
Service
Custom carrier PCBs delivered through Design Services — power, sensors, RF, antennas, BOM, gerbers.
System
Service + partners
Full-stack engagements through Design Services and our partner network — firmware, mechanicals, certifications, packaging.

Walk the ladder with us.

Start in JLandauer for the die, browse the catalog for the SoM, talk to us about the rest.