How to design and manufacture your own chip [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]

#11

Post by bsder » Fri, Jun 14, 2024, 8:52 PM UTC

kayson wrote: post #9

buescher wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really exciting what's going on with things like Tiny Tapeout/Efabless/ChipIgnite and whatever Google is sponsoring - I have a hard time keeping the players straight - as far as education and ambitious hobbyist use. You never know what will come from small designs, either. That said, despite what some ASIC houses will tell you, I haven't seen the costs narrowing on commercial ASIC design to the point that realiz…

For me, it was exciting, but now it's disappointing. The SkyWorks 130nm that TinyTapeout uses is ancient; they didn't really give away anything of value. The repository for that and the 90nm PDK haven't been touched in over a year. As I said, it's not substantial enough for me to think it's anything more than a PR stunt. Agreed. Custom design is still prohibitively expensive, and most often not needed. That being sai…

> That being said, older process nodes are getting cheaper to the point where the manufacturing cost is feasible.

The older nodes have been cheap enough for quite a while now. Folks like Xfab have nodes where you can generate chips for about the same price as you can an injection mold.

Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]

#12

Post by danielEM » Fri, Jun 14, 2024, 8:53 PM UTC

kayson wrote: post #8

danielEM wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you do analog chips, or digital ones? What chips did you design? How much it pays? Can it be profitable to design and tape out your own chip? What cheap FPGA would you recommend to drive two 2k screens, implement Gbps LiFi transceiver and some basic video decoder??? ;-)

I do mixed-signal, which is mostly transistor-level design (analog), but also a lot of digital - both transistor-/gate-level and RTL. I've mainly worked on RF transceivers for cellular, but eventually focused on ADC (analog to digital converters) IP that went into a variety of applications. Pay depends on a lot of things - experience, type of circuit design, company, geography, etc. I've found that hardware engineer…

Thanks for sharing these info!

One more question - what do you do for hobby? :-)

Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]

#13

Post by kayson » Fri, Jun 14, 2024, 10:18 PM UTC

danielEM wrote: post #12

kayson wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do mixed-signal, which is mostly transistor-level design (analog), but also a lot of digital - both transistor-/gate-level and RTL. I've mainly worked on RF transceivers for cellular, but eventually focused on ADC (analog to digital converters) IP that went into a variety of applications. Pay depends on a lot of things - experience, type of circuit design, company, geography, etc. I've found that hardware engineer…

Thanks for sharing these info! One more question - what do you do for hobby? :-)

Happy to share. Two main hobbies are violin and homelab.

Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]

#14

Post by kayson » Fri, Jun 14, 2024, 10:20 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #11

kayson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it was exciting, but now it's disappointing. The SkyWorks 130nm that TinyTapeout uses is ancient; they didn't really give away anything of value. The repository for that and the 90nm PDK haven't been touched in over a year. As I said, it's not substantial enough for me to think it's anything more than a PR stunt. Agreed. Custom design is still prohibitively expensive, and most often not needed. That being sai…

> That being said, older process nodes are getting cheaper to the point where the manufacturing cost is feasible. The older nodes have been cheap enough for quite a while now. Folks like Xfab have nodes where you can generate chips for about the same price as you can an injection mold.

Hadn't heard of Xfab. Very cool! By older nodes I meant like 28nm or 40nm. Looks like their smallest is currently 0.18 and that nodes been around since before I was even in school! It's definitely still useful for some applications, but not very competitive in my areas.

Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]

#15

Post by abdullahkhalids » Fri, Jun 14, 2024, 10:25 PM UTC

kayson wrote: post #9

buescher wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really exciting what's going on with things like Tiny Tapeout/Efabless/ChipIgnite and whatever Google is sponsoring - I have a hard time keeping the players straight - as far as education and ambitious hobbyist use. You never know what will come from small designs, either. That said, despite what some ASIC houses will tell you, I haven't seen the costs narrowing on commercial ASIC design to the point that realiz…

For me, it was exciting, but now it's disappointing. The SkyWorks 130nm that TinyTapeout uses is ancient; they didn't really give away anything of value. The repository for that and the 90nm PDK haven't been touched in over a year. As I said, it's not substantial enough for me to think it's anything more than a PR stunt. Agreed. Custom design is still prohibitively expensive, and most often not needed. That being sai…

I think the point is to incentivize development of (open) software and educational content for chip design and verification, while keeping costs low. Once people have the skills to do this, and there is enough demand, then it would make sense to allow manufacture of chips with better feature sizes.

Besides 130 nm is plenty good for a lot of industrial applications.

Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]

#16

Post by detourdog » Fri, Jun 14, 2024, 11:03 PM UTC

kayson wrote: post #3

We really need more of this. There's such a great ecosystem and community around software development and education, but IC design is at least a decade of not two behind in this regard. Unfortunately, the open source tools are also decades behind. They're really only practical for small designs on the couple of open source PDKs that exist (and those seem more like abandoned PR projects than serious commitments to ope…

I’m interested in big circuits closer to wire wrapping scale but larger.

I don’t expect a need for high megahertz but would be interested what to expect trade offs to expect as I scale up.

Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]

#17

Post by guiambros » Fri, Jun 14, 2024, 11:39 PM UTC

kayson wrote: post #3

We really need more of this. There's such a great ecosystem and community around software development and education, but IC design is at least a decade of not two behind in this regard. Unfortunately, the open source tools are also decades behind. They're really only practical for small designs on the couple of open source PDKs that exist (and those seem more like abandoned PR projects than serious commitments to ope…

Couldn't agree more. And Pat Deegan's YT channel [1] is such a gem. His last few videos covering asic design toolchain, Kicad 8, and FPGA design are excellent.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@PsychogenicTechnologies/videos

Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]

#18

Post by sbrorson » Fri, Jun 14, 2024, 11:50 PM UTC

kayson wrote: post #7

jjk166 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your opinion, other than for funsies, what would be a good situation for an open source project to pursue a custom IC vs say an FPGA or making due with a commercially available IC?

I think the only reason to do a custom IC, for now, is if you can't achieve your performance, power, area or price targets with FPGAs, microcontrollers, or other discrete components. It's still impractically expensive unless your volumes are enormous or your margins are very high. Even with a reasonable complex feature set, I think you can do better with individual components. You can get relatively cheap ARM cores,…

You mentioned the cost of tools a couple of times. What's wrong with using MOSIS, which is free? Just asking, since I don't know anything about this area except that MOSIS was mentioned multiple times when I was in grad school back in the 1980s.

Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]

#19

Post by bsder » Sat, Jun 15, 2024, 12:02 AM UTC

kayson wrote: post #14

bsder wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That being said, older process nodes are getting cheaper to the point where the manufacturing cost is feasible. The older nodes have been cheap enough for quite a while now. Folks like Xfab have nodes where you can generate chips for about the same price as you can an injection mold.

Hadn't heard of Xfab. Very cool! By older nodes I meant like 28nm or 40nm. Looks like their smallest is currently 0.18 and that nodes been around since before I was even in school! It's definitely still useful for some applications, but not very competitive in my areas.

180nm and bigger is just fine for a lot of things--especially analog or MEMS.

Lots of guitar pedals would be interesting and they can use old school 1um+ technologies that tolerate +-9V. Low power stuff actually likes larger transistors as they have much smaller leakage.

There's lots of interesting stuff to do if you can sink the NRE. The problem is that the super expensive CAD tools don't let you amortize something that isn't a million+ units.

Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]

#20

Post by kayson » Sat, Jun 15, 2024, 2:11 AM UTC

sbrorson wrote: post #18

kayson wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only reason to do a custom IC, for now, is if you can't achieve your performance, power, area or price targets with FPGAs, microcontrollers, or other discrete components. It's still impractically expensive unless your volumes are enormous or your margins are very high. Even with a reasonable complex feature set, I think you can do better with individual components. You can get relatively cheap ARM cores,…

You mentioned the cost of tools a couple of times. What's wrong with using MOSIS, which is free? Just asking, since I don't know anything about this area except that MOSIS was mentioned multiple times when I was in grad school back in the 1980s.

MOSIS is a fabrication service. The tools are totally separate, and you'd still have to pay to use them. Universities generally get free licenses though.