A new survey from chip-design startup Zero ASIC is drawing attention to the limited amount of open-source hardware work visible in the public GitHub accounts of large semiconductor companies. The company reviewed non-fork repositories related to chip design and compared their accumulated GitHub stars, using the result to argue that the industry has not supported open silicon infrastructure as strongly as it has supported open software.
The analysis, based on data collected on October 11, 2026, focused on public repositories rather than all engineering or financial contributions. Zero ASIC says its own projects ranked first by the chosen measure. It also divided star totals by approximate company headcount, producing a comparison that strongly favored its much smaller workforce. The author describes the exercise as illustrative rather than academic, an important limitation because stars measure public interest, not code quality, engineering effort, adoption or monetary support.
The post contrasts hardware with software projects that received substantial corporate backing. It points to Linux, TensorFlow and PyTorch as examples of open systems that grew with industry participation. In chip design, Zero ASIC says tools including OpenROAD, OpenFPGA and Yosys have not received the broad corporate contribution the author expected when working on DARPA programs launched in 2017.
Zero ASIC also checked companies listed in a directory of semiconductor startups. It identified Bluespec as a notable contributor because the company opened its BSC compiler and publishes RISC-V processor cores. Beyond a small number of examples, the survey found that many startup repositories concentrate on software development kits, model collections and inference demonstrations rather than reusable chip-design components.
The comparison should not be read as a complete ledger of open-source participation. It covers public GitHub organizations the author located, and the post concedes that missed organizations could change individual totals. It also does not account for contributions made upstream under personal accounts, consortium funding, standards work, documentation, testing or proprietary tools released through channels outside the repositories examined.
Even with those caveats, the exercise identifies a real divide in how companies present their public technical work. Software surrounding chips may be available for inspection, while register-transfer designs, verification infrastructure and implementation tools often remain closed. Zero ASIC frames the issue as both practical and cultural: firms have commercial reasons to protect valuable intellectual property, but could still release components that do not undermine their core business.
The post is ultimately an advocacy document from a company that treats open-source hardware as part of its mission. Its GitHub-star ranking is therefore best understood as a prompt for a more comprehensive measurement of industry participation, not a definitive ranking of which company contributes most.
