Who Makes Custom Chips?

toybuilder asks: "I have an idea for a neat consumer product that could benefit greatly from a really simple bare-die chip to reduce cost and size. I took a VLSI and chip design class back in college about 10 years ago, so I know how to design the circuit I want in CMOS. Now, I'm sure there must be fabs for older-generation designs (maybe in China/Taiwan) that I could have such a chip made -- I've seen bare chips in musical greeting cards and in tiny toy gadgets. How do I go about making my chip design into reality if I only want to make a fairly short run (a few *chips* during development, and maybe a 6" wafer's worth of the final design)?"

Comments

Uh...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Unless you're making 1 million of them, it just doesn't make sense. FPGA's and CPLDs aren't just for prototyping anymore, many small-run products use them.

Hell, depending on the simplicity, are you sure you can't get away with a pic microcontroller? That's what the OTPs are for, after all.

You don't.

[Jimmy_B]

Unless you're ordering a hundred bazillion, you don't get custom chips made, you use mass-produced programmable chips. Making custom chips requires a hugely expensive setup process, so it's extremely unlikely to be cheaper or better in any way.

Re:You DO?

[qwertphobia]

Sure, if the chip you want is a digital logic chip.

If you are doing any sort of signal creation or analysis, or a mixture of analog and digital, ann FPGA won't cut the mustard.

Consider going back to your school, to use their cleanroom (if they have one) and make your own. Maybe there's a program available as a business outreach or research arm that would let you do this as a student project if you include a few seniors.

If your school doesn't have a cleanroom, maybe the VLSI profs would know somebody who can spin a chip for you. There's lots of cleanrooms around, hiding in companies here and there, so you might not even need to go overseas.

Re:FPGA

[Austerity Empowers]

To answer the question, you need to approach a semiconductor fab: TSMC, IBM, LSI, etc. I haven't done ASICs in a while, but those were the ones we dealt with most. That said, the parent poster is right, unless you want to do a purely analog design.

The only drawback to FPGAs is component cost, it will always be higher than a custom IC. On the other hand you can get them from anywhere from $1, to $500, depending on how big of an FPGA you need. The real advantage is that you can develop your idea, mostly for free, prototype it and then convert to a custom IC later when you get funding. It's a great way to go that many very well funded companies start with.

Building a custom IC has a very high NRE. It requires lots of expensive tools (Simulation, Synthesis, Verification, Floorplanning) and you almost certainly won't get it right on your first rev. Respins aren't free. If you want to do a fully analog design, it's even harder and I suggest you try to sell your idea to companies that specialize in this.

If you can develop and prove your idea in an FPGA, and put together a believable business case, you can probably get the funding you need. Otherwise, especially right now, it'd be very hard.

Netcraft confirms it, ASIC's are dead

[spac]

Honestly though, ASIC's are truly dead but for many applications, and especially consumer applications.

From your post, you seem to be underestimating the amount of effort required to correctly design an ASIC. Verification that your hardware design is correct is an extremely difficult task and the fab costs will mean that you won't often be able to revise your design based on tests of the real world device.

If you choose an FPGA, as others have mentionned, you'll be able to inexpensively implement your logic on the device at a very low cost (for mid-low volumes). In addition, since it is field-programmable, you can revise the design, issue bugfixes, and add features very easily in most cases. If your sales ever end up reaching high volume, you will likely be able to easily transition (mostly) to a custom die ASIC when it becomes economical for you to do that.

To give you an example, the company I work for spent millions of dollars to design a custom processing ASIC for some of our hardware. Our newer boards include a reconfigurable processing FPGA and were developped for a fraction of the cost.

Re:Netcraft confirms it, ASIC's are dead

[eXtro]

Ugh. ASICs are nowhere near dead. FPGAs for most purposes are stillborn though. If I open up a cellular phone I'll see a fistful of integrated circuits and right now you can't get more consumer than that. Could that be due to the low power requirements and analog signal processing involved? Partly, but if I open up a DVD player I'll see a smaller fistful of integrated circuits, the same goes for a personal computer or even the control circuitry for a microwave oven.

FPGAs are great in a small number of area. FPGAs are expensive per unit compared to an equivalent dedicated ASIC but their up front costs are terribly low. The most expensive up-front cost would be your software and you can probably be dangerous for a few hundred bucks to a few thousand dollars. On the other hand the up front costs for an ASIC are tremendous, I don't work in consumer electronics but the non-recurring engineering charge for the ASIC I'm working on is 1 million dollars. We get a handful of test parts for that but a much smaller piece price than with FPGA technology.

The other area where they're useful is when you need to reconfigure the FPGA. I've seen FPGAs on digital VCR like devices for handling DRM for instance. For MPEG encoding they still use dedicated silicon though. Where I work we use them for reconfigurable computing but the circuitry they communicate to processor through are still custom ASICs.

If I were going to design something digital and the frequency wasn't too terribly high and the units shipped weren't very high either (thousands, maybe 10's of thousands) I'd probably use an FPGA. Outside of that design space the answer becomes quickturn ASICs and beyond that traditional ASICs.