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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)?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPGA FPGA
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!