3 ms·
Seems like a waste to tape something out and not make it generally available. Might as well make some money.
by h4b4n3r0 8y ago
Seems like a waste to tape something out and not make it generally available. Might as well make some money.
- rwmj 8y agoThe economics don't really work like that. These were likely built on a multiproject process similar to TSMC CyberShuttle where you share the wafer with many other projects to share costs. You can see _chris_ below said only a few dozen were made. This keeps costs within the range of reasonable, although I bet it still ended up costing thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Doing a run which would be vaguely profitable would require making millions of chips and cost millions of dollars up front, and very few projects could afford such a speculative investment. SiFive did do a VC funded commercial run, but I bet they are not yet making a profit on their boards even though they cost $1,000 each. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-project_wafer_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-project_wafer_service http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/services/cyberShuttle.htm http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/services/cyberS...