It takes $30 million for masks in 5nm. EDA tools for physical design are over $1 million per instance and you may need 20 to 200 licenses for a big chip. Tota

It takes $30 million for masks in 5nm. EDA tools for physical design are over $1 million per instance and you may need 20 to 200 licenses for a big chip. Total compensation for engineers is in the $150K to $400K range in the US. This isn't getting cheaper. PCB manufacturing is many orders of magnitude simpler and cheaper and easy to do at the hobbyist level.