I was actually quoted a price to outsourcing some IC design work to Chinese engineers. The price was about the same as my cost for engineers here in the US!! The interesting thing was that there was a disclamer that those engineers were not as experienced as US engineers and so we should expect project to take longer and require greater interaction. I'm thinking WTH, I thought they only worked for like a dollar an hour or something? The truth is of course that the middlemen are taking a cut which drives up the price. But this is just about the only way I could use those resources for small projects. The truth is that the cost of engineers in China or other countries can be lower if taken en mass and entire projects performed there as a whole.
But it was interesting to get that information because it just tells me that I'm certainly as competitive price wise with Chinese labor and definitley competitive technically for the right size project. And on top of that, their price is going to keep going up while they get more experienced and their standard of living improves. Maybe we have to stagnate for a while longer but it seems like things should improve for us with time.
If your device uses batteries then wireless makes more sense. If it's something that you don't ever want to replace batteries for, then you have to plug it in. At that point, you may as well plug it into the non-wireless network.
As buyers can we also be sellers? As the popularity of songs change we can be in the so call "market" making and losing money. Imagine buying 1000 copies of an unknown song only to resell them later for profit when a commercial or movie uses the song making it popular.
There are a lot of hurdles that this document doesn't really get into. It does mention manufacturing but here are some hard core items that need to be considered.
1. Yield goes as e^(-alpha * A) where A is your area and alpha is your yield coefficient. So if you have non-yielding chips on one wafer and you mate it to another wafer that also has non-yielding chips, your total yield goes down at somehting like Y^L where L is the number of layers and Y is the yield given above and Y is 1. So if your yield is 75% and you have 5 layers then your final yield will be only 23%.
2. Testing. If a whole wafer is bad and you put it in your stack of chips, all the chip stacks will be bad. It would be best to test before you put those wafers together. Thats not easy.
3. Packaging is a big issue. Will it be standard wire bonding or something else. Does this thing really generate a lot less heat? And are the interconnects really a lot shorter. If the chip to chip connects cost the same as inter die vias then maybe so but my guess is that those chip to chip connections are a lot more expensive and take a lot more area than vias within the same chip. And alignment of one wafer to the next is also an issue along with getting good interconnect all the way through those stacks.
Anyway, those are some thoughts. Its clear to me that 3D chips are a long way off and have there place in very specialized applications in the near term due to the complexities mentioned above.
Wardini
Could you please expand on this? Are you saying that it takes this much money to go after a patent infringer?
If I make a product that clearly violates someone elses patent then possibly I won't need to worry much about it if I really don't make much money from the product. It would never be worth it for them to come after me.
Slashdot Mirror
Or I'll just wait for that $100 PC. When is that coming out?
I was actually quoted a price to outsourcing some IC design work to Chinese engineers. The price was about the same as my cost for engineers here in the US!! The interesting thing was that there was a disclamer that those engineers were not as experienced as US engineers and so we should expect project to take longer and require greater interaction. I'm thinking WTH, I thought they only worked for like a dollar an hour or something? The truth is of course that the middlemen are taking a cut which drives up the price. But this is just about the only way I could use those resources for small projects. The truth is that the cost of engineers in China or other countries can be lower if taken en mass and entire projects performed there as a whole. But it was interesting to get that information because it just tells me that I'm certainly as competitive price wise with Chinese labor and definitley competitive technically for the right size project. And on top of that, their price is going to keep going up while they get more experienced and their standard of living improves. Maybe we have to stagnate for a while longer but it seems like things should improve for us with time.
If your device uses batteries then wireless makes more sense. If it's something that you don't ever want to replace batteries for, then you have to plug it in. At that point, you may as well plug it into the non-wireless network.
As buyers can we also be sellers? As the popularity of songs change we can be in the so call "market" making and losing money. Imagine buying 1000 copies of an unknown song only to resell them later for profit when a commercial or movie uses the song making it popular.
There are a lot of hurdles that this document doesn't really get into. It does mention manufacturing but here are some hard core items that need to be considered. 1. Yield goes as e^(-alpha * A) where A is your area and alpha is your yield coefficient. So if you have non-yielding chips on one wafer and you mate it to another wafer that also has non-yielding chips, your total yield goes down at somehting like Y^L where L is the number of layers and Y is the yield given above and Y is 1. So if your yield is 75% and you have 5 layers then your final yield will be only 23%. 2. Testing. If a whole wafer is bad and you put it in your stack of chips, all the chip stacks will be bad. It would be best to test before you put those wafers together. Thats not easy. 3. Packaging is a big issue. Will it be standard wire bonding or something else. Does this thing really generate a lot less heat? And are the interconnects really a lot shorter. If the chip to chip connects cost the same as inter die vias then maybe so but my guess is that those chip to chip connections are a lot more expensive and take a lot more area than vias within the same chip. And alignment of one wafer to the next is also an issue along with getting good interconnect all the way through those stacks. Anyway, those are some thoughts. Its clear to me that 3D chips are a long way off and have there place in very specialized applications in the near term due to the complexities mentioned above. Wardini
Could you please expand on this? Are you saying that it takes this much money to go after a patent infringer? If I make a product that clearly violates someone elses patent then possibly I won't need to worry much about it if I really don't make much money from the product. It would never be worth it for them to come after me.
What does GFS exactly do for you? Allow you to have your hard drive in another computer?