> Neither is it easy to start fabricating your own chips. Former top rank star level chip designer here. It's easy and cheap to do up to medium scale with FPG

> Neither is it easy to start fabricating your own chips. Former top rank star level chip designer here. It's easy and cheap to do up to medium scale with FPGAs. All you need is elbow grease, smarts and creativity. This gives a lot of experience. There are guys around that have made their own chips singlehandedly. These are smart guys. You'd think they'd be in huge demand. Hah hah. Larger scale cutting edge chips oh yeah, it gets extremely expensive, not just way beyond individual level, but way beyond most companies. There's just not enough foundries willing to produce designs from scratch for random third parties for it to be competitive for small scale things. Doing so is expensive. You only want to take known serious players, or those with enough cash to make it worthwhile regardless. But one can certainly do so on the cheap for a lot of more modest designs and develop the experience. There are even multiple fantastic free classes these days that teach chip design. Amazing. Not only that but we see some microcontrollers that have small FPGA sections built in so you can roll your own for some stuff in widely available architectures. Wow! This is amazing to have and few take advantage. However, the criticisms stated are generally true. And yeah, if you're smart enough to do good chip design, you can do better and have less stress doing something else for sure.