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

You DO?

[sPaKr]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPGA FPGA

Re:You DO?

[SydShamino]

This is the correct idea.

Custom ASICs start at $50k and go up for the die charges. Some companies that make them include IBM, Toshiba, and Oki.

However, you can get results that can be just as good with an FPGA. Consider the Cyclone II or Stratix II lines from Altera, or the Spartan III from Xilinx (be careful of power rail sequencing issues with Xilinx parts!). These will work into the hundreds of megahertz, and will cost you from $6 to $50 each, depending on size, performance, and features.

If your design takes off using a $35 FPGA, you can probably spend $75k on tooling and respin your product to use a $8 ASIC. But that only makes sense when you know you'll sell at least 75k/(35-8) ~= 2800 of them.

IBM

[simontek2]

I recall IBM has a program, where they will make your custom chip. This might have been something in the past, but I think they might still have it.
http://www-03.ibm.com/chips/asics/

Use Verilog or VHDL

[CMiYC]

Design it using a HDL and you won't have to worry about who builds it. If you can find a way to raise the $1mil in NRE for an ASIC, you're ready to go. If you can't, then you can just use the smallest FPGA your design will fit in.

Try a micro if possible

[wrmrxxx]

FPGAs are far cheaper than custom silicon for anything other than a massive production run, so the replies elsewhere are very sound advice. However, a small microcontroller (an eight bit device like an AVR or perhaps one of those new 32 bit ARM7 micros) will be significantly cheaper again. Not knowing anything about your requirements or design I can't say whether a microcontroller will enable you to achieve the desired results, but the cost advantages would make this well worth investigating.

The newest microcontrollers are incredibly capable devices, and have great peripherals. Even if you have to make a design compromise or two, or use some extra (non-custom) chips, software on a standard micro might be the cheapest option.

Mosis multi-project wafer

[sfm]

At one time you could do a multi-project Mosis wafer. No masks are made,
the data is directly written to the wafer. Each project makes up 10 to 20 die on a large wafer. Flextronics was doing this for a while too, but I believe they have moved to a different business model. Check out the following link to IBM talking about their current Mosis schedule. I'm sure more info is there on the website.

http://www-03.ibm.com/chips/asics/foundry/tools/mp w_sched.html

Good Luck

Maxim Semiconductor

[sleepingsquirrel]

Well, its more for analog circuitry, but take a look at the Maxim quickchips...

A QuickChip uses an uncommitted array of strategically placed devices that you can quickly interconnect to meet application requirements (similar to gate arrays for digital designs). Because there are fewer masks to customize, QuickChip arrays are easier to use, less expensive, and less time consuming than full custom design.

More info

[toybuilder]

Wow, I didn't realize that my submission was getting accepted! Sorry for the late response.

MOSIS is exactly what I was trying to remember from my college days. I only had exposure to this back in college, so I didn't remember the prices being so high. Maybe it was subsidized a lot back when I was doing it for educational use...

What I have in mind is a chip that conmbines very simple finite state machines, some additional counters and logic gates on the digital side. Imagine a 8" x 8" breadboard full of 74-series DIPs, and you'd get the basic idea of the low complexity on the digital side.

On the analog side, I want to have some caps, opamps, and very beefy output drivers.

The whole thing is going to be "thumb sized", including the battery and the output device, so there's not a lot of room. And smaller the better -- so that's why I was thinking of bare dies.

It looks like I should first try to find a mixed-signal programmable device and hope that there is a chip-scale packaging.

I had dismissed ASIC because they seemed like overkill. A tiny uC might be okay in light of the high development costs of a chip.

Thanks guys. This has been great!

Re:More info

[Solder Fumes]

Your application should fit on a cheap CPLD. The Xilinx and Altera offerings can be had for under $5 in a small QFP package and generous with the Kgates.

On the other side of the board you place your TSSOP package opamps and drivers and SMD capacitors.

Consider SOIC packaged standard parts

[OmniGeek]

Or bare-die op amps and a microcontroller. The cost of die-bonding bare dice to a small PC board and epoxy-potting them is waaay lower than any kind of custom chip, and is very compact, with low up-front cost compared to custom chips.

The previous poster's suggestion is, of course, even better IF you can find a stock chip that has the requisite analog capabilities. You can do a lot with small-outline surface-mount packages for op amps and microcontrollers; there are many inexpensive, powerful options there. The cost of rolling your own chip is SO high that it justifies expending great effort in trying to do the job with off-the-shelf parts instead. (And you'll want to prototype the device for testing anyway prior to committing to wafer fab, so you'll likely do this step anyway.)

PIC processors are great, and the Atmel AVR series microcontrollers (which I use for projects written in C) are amazingly powerful, quite cheap, have on-board EEPROM and flash, and have some have built-in ADC and DACs, and a lovely small-footprint RTOS, AVRX, plus an excellent development board. You might also want to check out SDCC, the Small Device C Compiler, which supporrts lotsa different controllers. Write what you can in C, optimize the critical parts in assembler.

Don't underestimate the power of digital signal processing, even using standard microcontrollers, as an alternative to a large cluster of analog parts. And best of luck. The technical end is the easiest part; marketing your wonder widget will be much harder, as it deals with human irrationality and whim instead of clean, logical electronic design (you can see why I'm an engineer instead of a salesman...)