Re: Design your Own Chip

mhx@iae.nl (mhx) writes:

One of the things I expect to happen in the next
decade is that people have their own chips and SOCs
*manufactured* like they currently order their
breadboards.

To some extent this has happened since the 1980s
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead%E2%80%93Conway_VLSI_chip_design_revolution>

I don't expect the extent to increase.  The reason is that the cost of
mask sets has increased to millions of dollars as processes have advanced.

So while MOSIS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSIS> and now TINY
TAPEOUT offer relatively cheap chip manufacturing for low numbers of
chips, MOSIS is funded by DARPA.  And I expect that there is also some
subsidy involved by the foundries, in the hope that some of the
projects will take off and get into high-volume production where they
pay real money for both the masks and the wafer processing.

The problem is not of design -- that has been possible
for a long time already.

I did not see much about TINY TAPEOUT withou JavaScript (which I did
not use), but from what I saw, their story is that they make the
designing easier and cheaper (and offer manufacturing for
one-stop-shopping).

Very probably this development will trigger interest
for very small, powerful, and memory efficient languages
(assuming these projects will use yesterday's chip
processes, not a 2nm fab).

A few years ago I looked at what MOSIS offers.  It had a number of
yesteryear processes, but also offered access to an almost-current
TSMC and IIRC Globalfoundry process.

I don't see what process TINY TAPEOUT offers.  The 160 x 100 um tile
may be a bit disappointing if it's a 0.35um process.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl  http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
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