The context here was making 1000 chips. Custom. You amortize (decide whether it's worth it) based on the 1000 chips. So yeah, if you are going to churn out a m

The context here was making 1000 chips. Custom. You amortize (decide whether it's worth it) based on the 1000 chips. So yeah, if you are going to churn out a million greeting cards, you might do a very simple and relatively inexpensive custom design (say not very many standard cells plain logic plus ROM of the exact size you need, slow, on a conservative node), and get a million slightly smaller custom chips and come ahead. If you are going to ship a thousand robot arms. You might need a high performance chip costly to design - and would only amortize that design cost over 1400 chips. So no, you may or may not be able to afford that design, that's not the issue. The issue is that it's not worth it. If it's an expensive military robot arm that launches missiles, you stuff 4-5 FPGAs in there. If it's a cheap robot arm, you stuff a Raspberry Pi in there. Either way, no custom chip for you and it's not a question of "couldn't possibly afford custom silicon".