Semiconductor manufacturing requires a lot of capital expense just to open the doors, it also requires a staff of all levels to keep the machinery working and m

Semiconductor manufacturing requires a lot of capital expense just to open the doors, it also requires a staff of all levels to keep the machinery working and multiple suppliers for raw materials that require multi-thousand dollar minimum orders. The process these facilities implement are fairly well understood, it’s just cost prohibitive. If you’re trying to draw parallels between this is and, say 3D printing, you will not find many similarities. PCB fabrication is also a a different beast but a lot of people think it’s as easy as finding a fab house that takes gerber files and creates a board for them. If we want something that more closely resembles how we develop software, we probably will need to develop processes that enables us to flash FPGAs like MCUs, make them fully read only, and allow the customer to etch their own marking onto the chip. There facilities that produce ASICs like this already, but I can see something more standardized becoming more successful for general purpose. This does however require that we have a foundry create the original chips, the difference here is that they are producing the same standardized chip for everyone which would allow any foundry to make compatible alternatives.