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Ask HN: IC Design Resources

4 points by matt3210 ↗ HN
Is it possible in this day and age to make custom ICs (ASIC) as a hobbyist? Lets say that I want an IC based on some verilog... lets say that I want 120 of them... Is it possible to get them made for reasonable price for hobby work... lets say... 1$ per chip?

Also looking for resources to learn how to make the designs (GDSII?). I have absolutely no clue what I'm doing here but I'm willing to sink about 1k into this little diversion while I'm looking for work.

I am currently an embedded software engineer and this appears to be the next level lower in the stack.

4 comments

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mac3n
It really depends on what you're trying to do and how much you can spend. For that quantity, an fpga might be better, although you won't find $1 per chip. And you can program it in Verilog.

If you really want to go low, look up what's currently available in printed electronics. But you might have to do your own transistor layouts.

simne
Impossible. 1$ per chip is for large batches, tens of thousands chips.

You must know few things.

Theoretically, all digital chips could be defined in verilog, but in reality exists few ASIC types.

For simplicity, I begin with FPGA - they are matrices, where configuration memory (RAM or ROM) used to define which rows/cols fused. In reality, now most FPGAs include distributed RAM cells, some serial transceivers, DSP blocks, and even CPU cores.

Next level, are just FPGAs but without configuration memory, but instead, used laser burnt fuses. They usually have up to ~2-3 times less power consumption, higher frequencies, and ~2 times cheaper then corresponding FPGA family. Sure, they have specially defined process of conversion from FPGA. With this type, you could save huge money, if buy chips without package (for example you may seen chips inside drop placed on PCB with glue).

Unfortunately, I cannot remember FPGA with price 1$ per chip or even near this.

Next are logical blocks. Yes, they are similar to software libraries, defined for exact factory technology. They are faster, but more expensive. As I hear you must buy at least one wafer (sure, you could try to find companion, so you both will buy parts of wafer). Here, to save money, could avoid standard testing and package.

And near last type, are "rendered" ASIC, for which you define design for lithography mask, this involves physical simulation, special handling of procedures of testing/fixing. Nearly all consumers CPUs and modern RAM are "rendered" ASIC. Example of special handling - RAM made with 6 memory blocks, but working 3-6, so after testing, they used laser burnt fuses, so controller configured to use only working parts of chip and on market appear chips with different RAM size, different speed, different cache size, etc. This is extremely costly to start, but with batches of millions chips, could be less then cents for a chip.