Fair point -- I forgot about MOSIS. Agreed, pretty reasonable for small test runs. I guess I've mostly heard of tapeouts when proving out a full design though,

Fair point -- I forgot about MOSIS. Agreed, pretty reasonable for small test runs. I guess I've mostly heard of tapeouts when proving out a full design though, e.g. TRIPS from UT-Austin (and they had a team of ~20 students, so that was worth a number of dissertations). I can't imagine doing a tapeout while working on caching or branch prediction or other core comparch subfields like that -- the deliverable is an algorithm and/or a new idea, not a physical proof of concept, and the usual effort (a grad-student-year or two, at most) isn't high enough. (All that said, seeing a real chip at the end of a project must be a heck of an exhilarating feeling of success...)