MOSIS has been around since the early '80's. In the past, I made experimental image sensor using the service.
How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
21–30 of 33 posts
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#22Earlier 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…
Would you know roughly how much IEEE charges for access to their salary survey?
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#23Earlier 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.
Perhaps you mean Magic:
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#24We 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…
1. Do smaller factories typically use pre-fabricated p-wafers with a FET gate-layer for CMOS?
2. Also, is it normal to see circular thickness defects over +-200nm where a wafer vacuum-chuck was obviously set during double-sided polishing? The deformed synthetic sapphire wafers are ruining my fun.
Thanks in advance, =)
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#25We 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…
What would be the best way to get into ic design (aside from college). Any suggestions on how to go from beginner to your level (Or maybe just share your path)?
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#26We 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…
Yeah I think it will always be that way though because there's no real reason for hobbyists to design a custom IC - anything they can afford to get manufactured could be done on an FPGA.
Still, even the open source FPGA tooling is very far behind the commercial software, and there is a reason for hobbyists to use FPGAs. I really hope it improves eventually.
I'm not very hopeful though. My experience of switching from the software industry to the hardware industry has shown me that most hardware people are just really bad at software and also don't really care about it. (Which is kind of weird because hardware design is really just programming for an unusual target platform.)
The fact that Verilator exists and mostly works is a big outlier.
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#27We 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…
Yeah I think it will always be that way though because there's no real reason for hobbyists to design a custom IC - anything they can afford to get manufactured could be done on an FPGA. Still, even the open source FPGA tooling is very far behind the commercial software, and there is a reason for hobbyists to use FPGAs. I really hope it improves eventually. I'm not very hopeful though. My experience of switching from…
there's no real reason for hobbyists to design a custom IC - anything they can afford to get manufactured could be done on an FPGA.
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I think it will always be that way though because there's no real reason for hobbyists to design a custom IC - anything they can afford to get manufactured could be done on an FPGA. Still, even the open source FPGA tooling is very far behind the commercial software, and there is a reason for hobbyists to use FPGAs. I really hope it improves eventually. I'm not very hopeful though. My experience of switching from…
there's no real reason for hobbyists to design a custom IC - anything they can afford to get manufactured could be done on an FPGA. Except if you work on a mac. No fpga for apple.
"Hmm no FPGA software for Mac, I guess I will have to design a custom ASIC instead...", said nobody.
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#29Earlier 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…
Would you know roughly how much IEEE charges for access to their salary survey?
I don't sorry. If you participate in it you get some free searches so I've never had to pay
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#30We 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…
Yeah I think it will always be that way though because there's no real reason for hobbyists to design a custom IC - anything they can afford to get manufactured could be done on an FPGA. Still, even the open source FPGA tooling is very far behind the commercial software, and there is a reason for hobbyists to use FPGAs. I really hope it improves eventually. I'm not very hopeful though. My experience of switching from…
Agreed. There's a great episode on the Microarch Club podcast (#10) about open source tooling and Verilator specifically. While Verilator is in an impressive state, it doesn't get any use by the big players.