Free ASICs.

[Bruce Perens]

Hamish Moffatt wrote:

Manufacturing an ASIC involves NRE (non-recurring engineering) costs of 
hundreds of thousands to millions per revision.

If you haven't looked at OpenCores.org yet, please do so to get an idea of how far they have been able to carry this so far.

I have priced this out as far as getting a chip through MOSIS, which is the step just before you'd go to full-wafer fabrication. Presumably you'd use the same process in MOSIS that you'd use for full-wafer. What I don't understand yet is the mask fabrication cost for full-wafer, and what it costs to do fabrication runs once you have the mask.

   Thanks

Bruce

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