How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#2Robert is such a cool guy, glad to see this here in HN.
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#3We 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 open hardware design).
Related, I thought this post was actually this video, which is tongue in cheek but a pretty good explanation of silicon manufacturing nonetheless: https://youtu.be/vuvckBQ1bME
Been doing IC design professionally since 2010. Happy to answer any questions.
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#4We 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…
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?
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#5We 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…
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??? ;-)
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#6We 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…
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 realizing an SoC would be a substantial cost savings on an aggressively cost-optimized microcontroller-based design or IoT design. Being able to do a commercially viable small-to-medium-sized ASIC for a design that ships, say, less than 2M/year, would change a lot of things. It would be very interesting if that were the case in 5-10 years - what do you see from the IC design perspective?
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#7We 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…
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, FPGAs, DSPs, microcontrollers, etc. I don't often see companies doing custom ICs for internal use.
That being said, I think the economies are changing. If you don't need a cutting edge process, the tapeout costs continue to come down. The problem that remains, though, is licensing cost of EDA tooling. There is a little bit of competition in that space, but not much. It is growing though, so hopefully that brings prices down.
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#8We 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…
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 salaries on levels.fyi seem pretty accurate. IEEE also does a salary survey that you can pay to access for really detailed searches. You're definitely looking at starting salaries in 6 figures, and it's competitive with, but still below software engineers.
At small scales, I don't think it's profitable to do your own chip design. Many companies who start are just looking to get acquired rather than really sell their own chips.
Not really familiar with FPGA offerings sorry! It's a growing hobbyist area, though, so I'm sure you can find a lot of information on social media, youtube, etc.
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#9We 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…
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 said, older process nodes are getting cheaper to the point where the manufacturing cost is feasible. The problem remains EDA tooling, which may very well be the majority of the cost. Without more competition in that space, I don't see Cadence/Synopsys/Siemens bringing their prices down any time soon.
Re: How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]
#10Very very cool.