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Who Makes Custom Chips?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the silicon-fabs dept.

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)?"

5 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. You DO? by sPaKr · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  2. IBM by simontek2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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/

    --
    SimonTek
  3. Use Verilog or VHDL by CMiYC · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. Mosis multi-project wafer by sfm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  5. More info by toybuilder · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!