3 ms·
> The engineering that went into this block was probably in the thousands of person-hours and involved some pretty rare engineering skills. It’s probably in th
by Closi 6y ago
> The engineering that went into this block was probably in the thousands of person-hours and involved some pretty rare engineering skills.
It’s probably in the tens of thousands - one person working on it by themselves for a year gets you to 2000 hours.
- baybal2 6y agoNo, even a one man team can do a cookie cutter SoC with hard macros these days. Mid-tier SoCs of around 2010-2012 period were done by teams of just 20-30 for most of brands on the market. Only after the mobile market skyrocketed did RnD expenses skyrocket too as market competition started to get serious.
- Closi 6y agoI’m assuming that this one wasn’t just a one man band, doing their own QA and making their own engineering samples. Looks like the author updated their hours estimate.
- baybal2 6y ago> I’m assuming that this one wasn’t just a one man band, doing their own QA and making their own engineering samples. You don't need to do anywhere as much validation if you just assemble hard macros, and other pre-validated circuitry. It's completely different to make an SoC from scratch on RTL level, vs what I was talking above.
- rahimiali 6y ago1) the age (now?) says “hundreds of thousands”, up two orders of magnitude from this. 2) it’s referring to the WiFi IP core, not the SoC itself, which seems an appropriate estimate. Just reading the 802.11 standard would account for a chunk of that time.