Aside: Although not strictly custom silicon, one can get close to making a custom chip with a Programmable System On Chip (PSoC) made by Cypress who look to have been "consumed". [1]
I did toy with the idea of making application specific "chips" from this system, but couldn't find enough inspiration. The design tooling - last time I looked - was pretty good.
They're more like microcontrollers with a small CPLD peripheral. Not enough programmable logic to implement an interesting IP core, last time I checked.
It is FPGA technology alongside analog blocks as well as other pre-defined peripherals available from the design tool. Most pin are unallocated and you drag and drop gates, ADCs counter etc etc and wire them up. If a block can be software controlled it is addressable via the ARM core and one can read hardware state in software.
> But please invite the verification team to the table. I might have another generation, and I’d like an option or a mode here. I’d like to flip this over. I would like to have multiple choices and options all the way through that. The verification person will sit down and tell you to validate and verify the core. But for every option, you’ve doubled the work, because you now need to test with and without. We all love the idea of the freedom and innovation — as long as we have some standards here to tape out on a reasonable timeframe.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 31.6 ms ] threadAside: Although not strictly custom silicon, one can get close to making a custom chip with a Programmable System On Chip (PSoC) made by Cypress who look to have been "consumed". [1]
I did toy with the idea of making application specific "chips" from this system, but couldn't find enough inspiration. The design tooling - last time I looked - was pretty good.
[1] https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/microcontroller/32-b...
> But please invite the verification team to the table. I might have another generation, and I’d like an option or a mode here. I’d like to flip this over. I would like to have multiple choices and options all the way through that. The verification person will sit down and tell you to validate and verify the core. But for every option, you’ve doubled the work, because you now need to test with and without. We all love the idea of the freedom and innovation — as long as we have some standards here to tape out on a reasonable timeframe.