6 ms·

TIL FTDI converters use a 600-800 nm node... that's almost a micron! The fact that they sell their chips for five fucking dollars a pop has always been kind of

by ohazi 5y ago

TIL FTDI converters use a 600-800 nm node... that's almost a micron! The fact that they sell their chips for five fucking dollars a pop has always been kind of obscene, but on such an old node, they really shouldn't cost more than a dollar, tops. No wonder they're so heavily cloned.

lmilcin 5y ago
The process is irrelevant and it is stupid to complain about it. Most chips are not general purpose CPUs and don't need and would not benefit from 5nm transistors. Larger components are actually preferable when talking signal noise, ESD susceptibility, etc.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  The complaint is about price, not process. But I'm also surprised something so large is being used. Isn't 130/180nm cheap for any kind of significant volume?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Sure, but what's the benefit?
    - vardump 5y ago
      Lower power consumption.
      - lmilcin 5y ago
        These chips already consume next to nothing.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      The benefit is getting like 5x as many chips per wafer.
      - pjc50 5y ago
        I suspect the minimum die size is dominated by all the pads required. Edit: maybe not, I found a die shot: https://zeptobars.com/en/read/FTDI-FT232RL-real-vs-fake-supereal https://zeptobars.com/en/read/FTDI-FT232RL-real-vs-fake-supe... - even on the genuine 2005 die there's lots of empty space. Could probably squash that by 50% with only moderate effort without even a process shrink. Now I'm wondering what volume FTDI see. Can't be too high or it would be a more competitive market.
        CamperBob2 5y ago
        It's not about the chips. They aren't in the business of selling chips, for better or worse. They are in the business of selling access to Windows drivers that work. Hence their knee-jerk reaction to the clones.
      - lmilcin 5y ago
        That's not true. First, you need to talk about whole cost of production and quality of the product. When you reduce your node your development and production costs grow exponentially. Size of the wafer is only small part of the production cost. Second, the chip area can't be arbitrarily small. You still need area to connect it with outside, area for larger components, etc. When you reduce your transistor size at some point the chip area will stop getting reduced because of packaging requirements.
        Dylan16807 5y ago
        > First, you need to talk about whole cost of production and quality of the product. When you reduce your node your development and production costs grow exponentially. Size of the wafer is only small part of the production cost. What exponent? The number of mask steps is similar or a few more from 600nm to 180nm. Isn't that the best way to estimate cost per wafer, in combination with the cost to make the masks? > Second, the chip area can't be arbitrarily small. You still need area to connect it with outside, area for larger components, etc. When you reduce your transistor size at some point the chip area will stop getting reduced because of packaging requirements. That's why I said 5x instead of 20x. I looked at the size of the pads and the circuitry around them, assumed they wouldn't shrink at all, then combined that with a somewhat pessimistic estimate of how much the logic could shrink.
- hda2 5y ago
  process is relevant to pricing which is the point of GP's complaint. FTDI is not pricing their products competitively. That's why clones are eating their lunch.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    > FTDI is not pricing their products competitively. There are alternatives to FTDI that are not clones to FTDI. For whatever reason people prefer to use FTDI in their design. FTDI does quite well on their chips which means it is stupid to say their products are not priced competitively -- they have competition and are still winning at it.
    - ohazi 5y ago
      > FTDI does quite well on their chips [...] and are still winning at it. You are making a guess. FTDI is a private company, and unless you are an insider or have done original research, you have no way of knowing whether the company is doing well financially. The price-per-reel on Digi-Key and how many chips you see in teardowns of legacy products and on cost-is-no-object FPGA boards isn't necessarily going to paint an accurate picture of this for you.
      - ohazi 5y ago
        To add a bit more to this: In my experience, when chips are expensive (for non-supply reasons), it's usually for one of three reasons: 1. There's nothing else like it on the market, so the manufacturer can charge whatever price they want, and designers will still buy those chips (that last part is critical). (e.g. certain specialized chips from Analog Devices) 2. The manufacturer's costs are out of control. This is rare today, but was common in the '80s and '90s. Most of those companies went bust or were acquired, and now the semiconductor design industry is extremely focused on cost efficiency. 3. The manufacturer can't sell enough chips at a competitive price to pay back the NRE costs of the design + a reasonable margin, so they're forced to sell at a higher price. If they don't have other products, and are not able to diversify or sell the company, this is a death spiral. For FTDI, (1) is clearly not the case -- they have lots of competitors, and the task that their chips perform (shoveling bytes around) is a basic one. FTDI's primary office is in Glasgow, Scotland, and they have satellite offices in China, Taiwan, Singapore, and the US. Their offices are tiny. (2) seems unlikely. That only leaves option (3). The semiconductor business is famously reliant on volume, and this is especially true for low-cost, small-die-area designs. You need to sell a metric fuckton of chips if you're selling them for a few dollars each. And the only way to get that kind of volume is to secure design wins in high-volume consumer electronic products that sell by the metric fuckton. Most of FTDI's volume appears to be in legacy products. Products that used to have a serial port, but that now need a USB port because computers don't have serial ports anymore. They make a few higher performance parts that seem to be designed specifically for FPGA vendors, because FPGAs often need a way to get as many Gbps as possible over a USB port, and FPGA vendors don't particularly care about an extra $20 chip, because their FPGA already costs $1000 and they don't want to muck-up their low-voltage process or waste pins and die area to support USB. Also the FPGA vendors picked FTDI ages ago, and don't want to rewrite their shitty, shitty software. But you'll never see that FPGA USB-serdes chip designed into a laptop or a phone or a camera, because there are cheaper options available, and because the functionality can be had essentially for free when integrated onto the high performance SoC that requires it. FTDI probably has enough volume on their legacy chips to cover their costs, but that's because the design is ancient and was paid off years ago, and because there are a lot of legacy industrial products that aren't going away anytime soon. The fact that they're still overpriced relative to competitors means they're not a product of choice for new designs, and are a particularly obvious candidate for cost-reductions. I don't know anyone who willingly designs in an FT2232 when a CP2104 will do the trick, especially after FTDI flushed their reputation away with that driver fiasco. So this part of their business is likely to shrink. The FPGA vendors sell maybe a few thousand units of their $1000 - $10,000 FPGA boards. That's probably not enough volume to cover the costs of FTDI's higher performance chips, even at $20 a pop. The sad thing is that (1) used to be true, back when USB was new, and there were a lot of buggy implementations. FTDI got it right, and they even had a reputation for a driver that "just worked." The answer to the question "How do I do USB?" used to be "Just shut up and buy an FTDI chip." An enviable position at the time, but as USB became more ubiquitous and better understood, their competitors caught up. Other vendors have good implementations and good drivers now. Good USB IP for chip designs is also readily available, so many microcontroller designs can do without FTDI now. The FTDI driver fiasco was the worst thing they could have possibly done with the one thing they still had going for them -- they trashed the reputation of the quality of their driver, and now everyone looks at them with suspicion. Normally you would expect a semiconductor company with a limited, overpriced product line to be an acquisition target, but the fact that this hasn't happened despite the fact that they're a relatively small target suggests that the bigger players either looked at their books or did the math and realized that their market is shrinking and they have no growth prospects. tl;dr FTDI may not be doing as well as you think they are. Rather than doing well because their chips "command a high price" -- every indication suggests that they are resting on their laurels, they know their long-term prospects are grim, and are trying to squeeze out as much as they can before they go bust or are forced to sell themselves for scrap.
- ohazi 5y ago
  I wasn't complaining about the process. Use 10 micron for all I care. This particular process was perfected in the late '80s, and the costs reflect that. From TFA: > Die manufacturing cost is roughly the same for both dies (~10-15 cents) . Again, this chip should never cost more than a dollar, even in single unit quantities.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    > Again, this chip should never cost more than a dollar, even in single unit quantities. Do you want to say we should abolish free market? There are alternatives to FTDI in its niche but for some reason people prefer FTDIs chips even though the cost much more than alternatives. It is practically definition of fair competition. Some try to produce cheap and some try to produce quality.
    - ohazi 5y ago
      > Do you want to say we should abolish free market? Don't build a straw man. FTDI has every right to charge whatever they want, just as I have every right to call them greedy bastards who would rather play dirty games with their drivers than acknowledge that their products haven't been priced competitively for years. If you really want to play this game... One could argue that in a truly free market, the copycat chips would be legal. But it's not even about quality vs. price. FTDI's legitimate competitors often have better designs while also selling them for less. FTDI's only advantage is that they were early, and people are often reluctant to change an existing design that already works.

by ohazi 5y ago

lmilcin 5y ago

The process is irrelevant and it is stupid to complain about it. Most chips are not general purpose CPUs and don't need and would not benefit from 5nm transistors. Larger components are actually preferable when talking signal noise, ESD susceptibility, etc.

Dylan16807 5y ago
The complaint is about price, not process. But I'm also surprised something so large is being used. Isn't 130/180nm cheap for any kind of significant volume?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Sure, but what's the benefit?
  - vardump 5y ago
    Lower power consumption.
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      These chips already consume next to nothing.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    The benefit is getting like 5x as many chips per wafer.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      I suspect the minimum die size is dominated by all the pads required. Edit: maybe not, I found a die shot: https://zeptobars.com/en/read/FTDI-FT232RL-real-vs-fake-supereal https://zeptobars.com/en/read/FTDI-FT232RL-real-vs-fake-supe... - even on the genuine 2005 die there's lots of empty space. Could probably squash that by 50% with only moderate effort without even a process shrink. Now I'm wondering what volume FTDI see. Can't be too high or it would be a more competitive market.
      - CamperBob2 5y ago
        It's not about the chips. They aren't in the business of selling chips, for better or worse. They are in the business of selling access to Windows drivers that work. Hence their knee-jerk reaction to the clones.
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      That's not true. First, you need to talk about whole cost of production and quality of the product. When you reduce your node your development and production costs grow exponentially. Size of the wafer is only small part of the production cost. Second, the chip area can't be arbitrarily small. You still need area to connect it with outside, area for larger components, etc. When you reduce your transistor size at some point the chip area will stop getting reduced because of packaging requirements.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        > First, you need to talk about whole cost of production and quality of the product. When you reduce your node your development and production costs grow exponentially. Size of the wafer is only small part of the production cost. What exponent? The number of mask steps is similar or a few more from 600nm to 180nm. Isn't that the best way to estimate cost per wafer, in combination with the cost to make the masks? > Second, the chip area can't be arbitrarily small. You still need area to connect it with outside, area for larger components, etc. When you reduce your transistor size at some point the chip area will stop getting reduced because of packaging requirements. That's why I said 5x instead of 20x. I looked at the size of the pads and the circuitry around them, assumed they wouldn't shrink at all, then combined that with a somewhat pessimistic estimate of how much the logic could shrink.
hda2 5y ago
process is relevant to pricing which is the point of GP's complaint. FTDI is not pricing their products competitively. That's why clones are eating their lunch.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  > FTDI is not pricing their products competitively. There are alternatives to FTDI that are not clones to FTDI. For whatever reason people prefer to use FTDI in their design. FTDI does quite well on their chips which means it is stupid to say their products are not priced competitively -- they have competition and are still winning at it.
  - ohazi 5y ago
    > FTDI does quite well on their chips [...] and are still winning at it. You are making a guess. FTDI is a private company, and unless you are an insider or have done original research, you have no way of knowing whether the company is doing well financially. The price-per-reel on Digi-Key and how many chips you see in teardowns of legacy products and on cost-is-no-object FPGA boards isn't necessarily going to paint an accurate picture of this for you.
    - ohazi 5y ago
      To add a bit more to this: In my experience, when chips are expensive (for non-supply reasons), it's usually for one of three reasons: 1. There's nothing else like it on the market, so the manufacturer can charge whatever price they want, and designers will still buy those chips (that last part is critical). (e.g. certain specialized chips from Analog Devices) 2. The manufacturer's costs are out of control. This is rare today, but was common in the '80s and '90s. Most of those companies went bust or were acquired, and now the semiconductor design industry is extremely focused on cost efficiency. 3. The manufacturer can't sell enough chips at a competitive price to pay back the NRE costs of the design + a reasonable margin, so they're forced to sell at a higher price. If they don't have other products, and are not able to diversify or sell the company, this is a death spiral. For FTDI, (1) is clearly not the case -- they have lots of competitors, and the task that their chips perform (shoveling bytes around) is a basic one. FTDI's primary office is in Glasgow, Scotland, and they have satellite offices in China, Taiwan, Singapore, and the US. Their offices are tiny. (2) seems unlikely. That only leaves option (3). The semiconductor business is famously reliant on volume, and this is especially true for low-cost, small-die-area designs. You need to sell a metric fuckton of chips if you're selling them for a few dollars each. And the only way to get that kind of volume is to secure design wins in high-volume consumer electronic products that sell by the metric fuckton. Most of FTDI's volume appears to be in legacy products. Products that used to have a serial port, but that now need a USB port because computers don't have serial ports anymore. They make a few higher performance parts that seem to be designed specifically for FPGA vendors, because FPGAs often need a way to get as many Gbps as possible over a USB port, and FPGA vendors don't particularly care about an extra $20 chip, because their FPGA already costs $1000 and they don't want to muck-up their low-voltage process or waste pins and die area to support USB. Also the FPGA vendors picked FTDI ages ago, and don't want to rewrite their shitty, shitty software. But you'll never see that FPGA USB-serdes chip designed into a laptop or a phone or a camera, because there are cheaper options available, and because the functionality can be had essentially for free when integrated onto the high performance SoC that requires it. FTDI probably has enough volume on their legacy chips to cover their costs, but that's because the design is ancient and was paid off years ago, and because there are a lot of legacy industrial products that aren't going away anytime soon. The fact that they're still overpriced relative to competitors means they're not a product of choice for new designs, and are a particularly obvious candidate for cost-reductions. I don't know anyone who willingly designs in an FT2232 when a CP2104 will do the trick, especially after FTDI flushed their reputation away with that driver fiasco. So this part of their business is likely to shrink. The FPGA vendors sell maybe a few thousand units of their $1000 - $10,000 FPGA boards. That's probably not enough volume to cover the costs of FTDI's higher performance chips, even at $20 a pop. The sad thing is that (1) used to be true, back when USB was new, and there were a lot of buggy implementations. FTDI got it right, and they even had a reputation for a driver that "just worked." The answer to the question "How do I do USB?" used to be "Just shut up and buy an FTDI chip." An enviable position at the time, but as USB became more ubiquitous and better understood, their competitors caught up. Other vendors have good implementations and good drivers now. Good USB IP for chip designs is also readily available, so many microcontroller designs can do without FTDI now. The FTDI driver fiasco was the worst thing they could have possibly done with the one thing they still had going for them -- they trashed the reputation of the quality of their driver, and now everyone looks at them with suspicion. Normally you would expect a semiconductor company with a limited, overpriced product line to be an acquisition target, but the fact that this hasn't happened despite the fact that they're a relatively small target suggests that the bigger players either looked at their books or did the math and realized that their market is shrinking and they have no growth prospects. tl;dr FTDI may not be doing as well as you think they are. Rather than doing well because their chips "command a high price" -- every indication suggests that they are resting on their laurels, they know their long-term prospects are grim, and are trying to squeeze out as much as they can before they go bust or are forced to sell themselves for scrap.
ohazi 5y ago
I wasn't complaining about the process. Use 10 micron for all I care. This particular process was perfected in the late '80s, and the costs reflect that. From TFA: > Die manufacturing cost is roughly the same for both dies (~10-15 cents) . Again, this chip should never cost more than a dollar, even in single unit quantities.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  > Again, this chip should never cost more than a dollar, even in single unit quantities. Do you want to say we should abolish free market? There are alternatives to FTDI in its niche but for some reason people prefer FTDIs chips even though the cost much more than alternatives. It is practically definition of fair competition. Some try to produce cheap and some try to produce quality.
  - ohazi 5y ago
    > Do you want to say we should abolish free market? Don't build a straw man. FTDI has every right to charge whatever they want, just as I have every right to call them greedy bastards who would rather play dirty games with their drivers than acknowledge that their products haven't been priced competitively for years. If you really want to play this game... One could argue that in a truly free market, the copycat chips would be legal. But it's not even about quality vs. price. FTDI's legitimate competitors often have better designs while also selling them for less. FTDI's only advantage is that they were early, and people are often reluctant to change an existing design that already works.