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You could dip your toe in by getting a design produced, if you're interested in the process. Google and efabless accept submissions every few months for design
by lunixicityee 5y ago
You could dip your toe in by getting a design produced, if you're interested in the process.
Google and efabless accept submissions every few months for designs that use a free 130nm process development kit:
https://efabless.com/open_shuttle_program https://efabless.com/open_shuttle_program
130nm is plenty ancient; it's the same feature size as a >10-year-old STM32F1, I think. And I hear that those MPW runs are starting to accept ~$10K for a guaranteed spot with a closed-source design.
So you'd probably be looking at charging 6 figures per wafer. I don't have good insight into startup costs, but I would guess high 8-low 10 figures. Running costs would not be negligible either.
Is that possible? I haven't crunched the numbers and I don't have enough information or context to do so accurately. But my gut says that it might depend on how many billionaires you're on good terms with.
- baybal2 5y ago> Is that possible? I haven't crunched the numbers and I don't have enough information or context to do so accurately. But my gut says that it might depend on how many billionaires you're on good terms with. 130nm is quite ancient, but there are digital parts from early nineties still on the market. They are way bigger than 130nm. Right now I have an ongoing project with a company making aircons. Their kit supplier uses a really, really ancient, and rare Hitachi MCU made on 600nm, and they are paying few dollars for it — more than some modern ARM SoCs. They really want to change their kit supplier, or compel the chip supplier to cut cost, but the kit supplier itself can't migrate from Hitachi MCU because they don't have firmware sources as they themselves only copypasted the firmware as a binary for decades..
- pbourke 5y ago> but the kit supplier itself can't migrate from Hitachi MCU because they don't have firmware sources as they themselves only copypasted the firmware as a binary for decades.. That’s seems like a rather existential problem. If I’m understanding correctly, the kit supplier makes the control board and the manufacturer does final assembly?
- baybal2 5y agoYes, and the Chinese kit supplier seemingly got the tech from a Japanese aircon maker somewhere in nineties, and then copied the board verbatim ever since.
- pbourke 5y agoI wonder if you could run the firmware in emulation on a more recent CPU.
- baybal2 5y agoI don't think one can even fund assembler docs for a chip so old, rare, and obscure as first SH-1,2,3 families.
- pbourke 5y agoI don’t know anything about these, but found it interesting that people have ported Linux to these chips as they’ve come off patent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperH#J_Core https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperH#J_Core
- baybal2 5y agoThat is for much more recent, and bigger cores. The one I talk about has a kilobyte of ROM, and is an original SuperH from early nineties.
- AlotOfReading 5y agoThis is a weird comment. One of the key features of the SuperH ISA is that it's more or less backwards compatible. I worked on them in the 00s/10s, but I can't imagine they had an entirely different ISA in the 90s. I also know that commercial SH3 emulators exist because I've used them. Heck, Renesas used to ship one with the toolchain.
- 5y ago
- KirillPanov 5y ago> And I hear that those MPW runs are starting to accept ~$10K for a guaranteed spot with a closed-source design. That is absolutely not true.