| Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff |
| Fabrication your own chips |
| (1/2) > >> |
| ali_asadzadeh:
Hi, After years of working on Smart grid industry, I think my VHDL design on a Xilinx FPGA would be ready under 3 months for prodcution,And I think it would make a lot of sense to build it into an ASIC. my design clock is around 120MHz, Also i have a very limited budge, Under 10K$ and I want to manufacture around at least 1K units for the first run. After some random search on the net, I found this PDF with real prices on that. https://europractice-ic.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/General-MPW-EUROPRACTICE-200212-v5.pdf Also We have seen Chinese techs like padauk semi! with 0.03$ MCU's, So I asked myself why not give it shot! The lowest price from this PDF is from on semiconductor for 0.7u node, it's around 300ERU for 1mm area! can my design reach 120MHz @ 0.7um? my current design can fit on a 50K lut FPGA from xilinx (ARTIX 7) So my question is this, Can my dream be come true? what about Chinese companies?are you aware of one? can we achieve it? Any Ideas are welcomed ^-^ ;) |
| hans:
I know europractice as a facilitator for academic research (universities) in IC design, which need low-cost (e.g. almost 'free') access to tools (e.g. Cadence, Synopsys) and new IC technologies. I'm not sure if this pricelist is realistic for companies. I don't have experience with pricing in industry, but I imagine them to be far more expensive. For one, ICs of multiple research projects are usually pooled and large research groups may only send a couple of tape-outs per year. Then, these pricing may also only limit an one-off design, where the real intent is prototyping, design&simulation verification such that the novelty can be published in IC conferences or journals. Some of these price lists may not include packaging. I've seen a colleague working on a rather large IC requiring a fairly large package (>=100pins), and I think his packaging fee for a couple dozen chips was half your budget. Also 0.7um is quite old, like dating back to the early 90s. The Pentium chips of that era ran 60-100MHz on that technology. Honestly I think a 1K volume to replace an FPGA is too low. Most figures I hear being tossed is a volume of 10 to 100K+ for an ASIC to make sense. |
| ali_asadzadeh:
Thanks for the info, 10K is huge in china market, also you can find many things about 5 to 10X lower prices in china, I wonder what fabs or tech the paduk use! so with my budget we can buy around 330K units of their MCU in single unit price ;D I think something between 350 to 180nm may have very good prices there, our Chinese friends may shed some light on us,and If I can make 10K to 100K with my budget,I would do it without a doubt! Besides nobody works for free,even for universities! they certainly make 50% profit on these prices,so they can keep it like this. |
| SiliconWizard:
For such low quantities, your best bet would be those MPW services such as Europractice, but there are others worldwide. Your main issue cost-wise will be getting access to the development tools (such as Cadence/Synopsys) and the PDK for the choosen CMOS process. If your ICs contain only logic, there are services that can do this for you - you essentially give them the HDL, with a few back-and-forth with them to fix some potential issues, and they do the rest. Likely to be more cost-effective, unless you have access to the required above tools already (for instance through some university - but usually it's not possible for commercial uses.) (Note there are also services for full mixed-signal designs, but that's a lot more expensive.) There are independent (fabless) design services like this, and some semiconductor vendors also provide one, such as On Semi: https://www.onsemi.com/PowerSolutions/content.do?id=16788 And of course you still need to make sure this is worth it for just a few hundreds or even a few thousands ICs. |
| sam[PS]:
I don't know if they still do that but few years ago ALTERA offered a semicustom ASIC service where you could develop your design on some of their FPGA then when you are happy with it you just send them your design files and they build semicustom chip for you. I believe it's just the same fpga fabric without the programmable interconnections, they just hard wire the connexion on the top copper layers. Anyway in your case i think it worst checking they still offer it. Just my 2cts... |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |