4 ms·

I honestly think this is fundamentally impossible. Factory tech and Agile just don't mix. Failing in software is cheap, but with silicon, no matter how low the

by jdw64 5mo ago

I honestly think this is fundamentally impossible. Factory tech and Agile just don't mix. Failing in software is cheap, but with silicon, no matter how low the tape-out costs are, every failure costs you a massive amount of physical time. Also, open-source EDA tools are currently stuck on legacy nodes. Considering the huge gap with state-of-the-art nodes, why would anyone even bother? Software monetization works because of scale-out. (The fatal flaw of SaaS is the endless pressure to update, completely ruining the idea of 'finished' software.) But hardware? Once it's taped out, it’s a physical endpoint that needs no maintenance. How are you supposed to charge a monthly subscription for that

elevation 5mo ago
Why couldn't a company committed to mask fabrication and wafer fabrication, in concept, perform these steps daily, or several times daily? Multiple prototype designs could be grouped together so multiple customers can realize a new design instance in the same iteration. With an appropriate debug core in the same wafer, designers who'd completed a tape-out could connect to their chip well enough to repeat their design-verification tests on this real hardware, remotely even (no need to physically handle the device 'til you're certain it's working.) Once satisfied, customers could promote their design to be bonded out for installation into their PCB. "Sure thing boss, we'll add an extra USART core to this afternoon's tape out."
- monocasa 5mo ago
  The wafer manufacturing process takes weeks to months after a tape out.
  - elevation 5mo ago
    Accelerating this process sounds like a good focus for an SBIR (small business innovation research) RFP.
    - pjc50 5mo ago
      A fab is not a small business! Part of the delay is really just commercial. Fabs are optimized for utilization - throughput, not latency. A fab operator will prefer to queue up a load of work with as few gaps as possible, and your shuttle service run has to fit in one of the gaps. If you're NVIDIA and you've already booked the fab, there might not be so much delay. But not zero. Nice little backgrounder: https://siliconmasters.co/blogs/our-blog/how-photomasks-for-ic-production-are-made https://siliconmasters.co/blogs/our-blog/how-photomasks-for-...
      - petsfed 5mo ago
        Just to buttress and embroider around your point that a fab is not a small business: If there was a realistic way even to go from bare wafers to non-trivial custom chips in a small-batch fashion, you can bet there would be a cottage industry around it. I would love to live in a world where I could manufacture custom silicon as easily as I can manufacture a custom PCB or custom mechanical part. But as it stands, quick-turn, rapid-proto "micro" fabs are obscenely expensive, to the extent that if you aren't absolutely certain you need the performance gains from custom silicon, justified by years of R&D that confirms the inadequacy of a multi-chip solution, then the idea is killed before any layout engineer is contacted. Microfabs are either operated by research institutes, or they're booked solid for years, and basically printing money.
        whateverboat 5mo ago
        The closest thing to that cottage industry is IMEC.
        joe_mamba 5mo ago
        IMEC is a lab, not a fab. They have partnerships with all major fabs for driving research forwards and making prototypes and concepts, but they don't manufacture anything there, it's still up to Samsung, Intel or TSMC to try out whatever IMEC comes up with. They may have lasers, electron microscopes, probes, etc on-site for testing what Intel or TSMC ship them and verify research results, but that's pretty far away from a "cottage industry". Intel and Samsung are the true "cottage industries" as they do full vertical integration of IP, R&D and manufacturing under the same roof. IMEC is more like the UN of semi companies, a place for them to come together, talk, share knowledge and results and decide industry standardisation based on that.
- jdw64 5mo ago
  [dead]
- elictronic 5mo ago
  Because you are dealing with the physical world where those different designs have different requirements that can conflict. It’s like saying all software is basically the same, why don’t you just abstract it all and run it on these Raspberry Pi’s. You can do that, but it’s going to turn out poorly.
- bee_rider 5mo ago
  I sort of expected this to happen with tightly coupled customer-customizable chiplets inside a single package, instead. But it seems that packaging is also better left to Intel and AMD, I guess.
- IshKebab 5mo ago
  > Multiple prototype designs could be grouped together They do this, it's called a multi-project wafer (it's on Wikipedia). It doesn't help with lead time of course. As far as I know tape-out cost is a lot cheaper (if your design is microcontroller-scale) but still in the $100k+ region.
- jimmyswimmy 5mo ago
  The iteration cycles are limited necessarily by the time between tapeout and getting chips off the line to a testable state. Maybe there's a little room to get an in-wafer test probe system built at the fab if each die has a standard pad layout, which would speed up the 'testable state' part of that timeline. But if your timeline is weeks (if only!) to months, there's little utility in being able to make incremental changes on a daily basis. Plus, the only way fab costs become achievable are MPW runs which don't have adequate demand for multiple daily runs. The ones I've used run a few processes each month, rotating between most of them on a bimonthly to quarterly basis. They just don't fill up fast enough. But I'm small time fabless so maybe I'm missing something.
TheJoeMan 5mo ago
Regarding hardware, it's not entirely true that it doesn't need maintenance/development. See "stepping" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepping_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepping_level. There are sometimes ways to tweak the masks to fix a "silicon bug".
- pjc50 5mo ago
  Yes, but that still costs significant money in a way that software deployment doesn't. IME most chips get maybe one or two metal layer revisions then a rev B consolidated bugfix - and then get left alone.
  - Espressosaurus 5mo ago
    Yeah, my experience has been exactly that. And the person paying the bills will try as hard as possible to avoid/delay a metal rev as possible because they’re expensive and time consuming so they blow up the schedule if you can’t release the chip with rev. A. One place I worked at did fast iteration by pushing as much of the risk as they could off the silicon and by using several distinct ASICs instead of a single monolithic one which would have had better performance on its own. Gave them the ability to rev the different parts at the rate they needed it at a cost to software complexity and hardware compatibility and cost.
pjc50 5mo ago
To add to this: the downstream customers also hate change, just as much as people hate Windows updates. They much prefer being able to buy the same chip for 10 years. (here at Medium-Size-Fabless-Semi-Inc, I'm in the middle of revving a bunch of parts that are about 10 years old, not because we want to add new features to them but because the process node is so obsolete it's becoming difficult to fab. Yes, they're getting new features, but that's not the primary driver of business) On the other hand, because parts are physical objects, you can charge money for them. Piracy is .. not nonexistant (ask FTDI) but not a major concern. There are some interesting corners for rapid-rev electronics, but there's a decision tree: - can I do this with a microcontroller? - if not, how about an FPGA? - ok, there really is no alternative to ASIC, is the market size enough to support that?
- alefalfa 5mo ago
  I find it ironic how different the culture is between software and hardware people. This makes me very happy about my decision of going into software
  - nickff 5mo ago
    What is ironic about this? I am not trying to be difficult, I just don't understand. There is definitely a huge gap, where hardware people spend a great deal of time creating and testing things, that they then want to manufacture for long enough to pay it back. It seems like on the (web) software side, people want to try something out (maybe over a weekend), launch it quickly, then shut it down when they figure out it's not going anywhere (the Google approach).
  - idiotsecant 5mo ago
    Yes, the feeling is apparently mutual based on this post
- jdw64 5mo ago
  Your perspective is much more refined than mine, and I'm learning a lot from it. You come across as a senior programmer in the exact same industrial equipment field as me. Thank you for taking the time to comment
goobatrooba 5mo ago
Pharma companies developing new molecules spend millions to patent all chemicals close to their target chemical, to avoid that a competitor might be able to jump in with a similar product. This is before they even know whether it works. If variation is cheap why not run directly 5-50 versions of the chip and see which works best?

by jdw64 5mo ago

elevation 5mo ago

Why couldn't a company committed to mask fabrication and wafer fabrication, in concept, perform these steps daily, or several times daily? Multiple prototype designs could be grouped together so multiple customers can realize a new design instance in the same iteration. With an appropriate debug core in the same wafer, designers who'd completed a tape-out could connect to their chip well enough to repeat their design-verification tests on this real hardware, remotely even (no need to physically handle the device 'til you're certain it's working.) Once satisfied, customers could promote their design to be bonded out for installation into their PCB. "Sure thing boss, we'll add an extra USART core to this afternoon's tape out."

monocasa 5mo ago
The wafer manufacturing process takes weeks to months after a tape out.
- elevation 5mo ago
  Accelerating this process sounds like a good focus for an SBIR (small business innovation research) RFP.
  - pjc50 5mo ago
    A fab is not a small business! Part of the delay is really just commercial. Fabs are optimized for utilization - throughput, not latency. A fab operator will prefer to queue up a load of work with as few gaps as possible, and your shuttle service run has to fit in one of the gaps. If you're NVIDIA and you've already booked the fab, there might not be so much delay. But not zero. Nice little backgrounder: https://siliconmasters.co/blogs/our-blog/how-photomasks-for-ic-production-are-made https://siliconmasters.co/blogs/our-blog/how-photomasks-for-...
    - petsfed 5mo ago
      Just to buttress and embroider around your point that a fab is not a small business: If there was a realistic way even to go from bare wafers to non-trivial custom chips in a small-batch fashion, you can bet there would be a cottage industry around it. I would love to live in a world where I could manufacture custom silicon as easily as I can manufacture a custom PCB or custom mechanical part. But as it stands, quick-turn, rapid-proto "micro" fabs are obscenely expensive, to the extent that if you aren't absolutely certain you need the performance gains from custom silicon, justified by years of R&D that confirms the inadequacy of a multi-chip solution, then the idea is killed before any layout engineer is contacted. Microfabs are either operated by research institutes, or they're booked solid for years, and basically printing money.
      - whateverboat 5mo ago
        The closest thing to that cottage industry is IMEC.
        joe_mamba 5mo ago
        IMEC is a lab, not a fab. They have partnerships with all major fabs for driving research forwards and making prototypes and concepts, but they don't manufacture anything there, it's still up to Samsung, Intel or TSMC to try out whatever IMEC comes up with. They may have lasers, electron microscopes, probes, etc on-site for testing what Intel or TSMC ship them and verify research results, but that's pretty far away from a "cottage industry". Intel and Samsung are the true "cottage industries" as they do full vertical integration of IP, R&D and manufacturing under the same roof. IMEC is more like the UN of semi companies, a place for them to come together, talk, share knowledge and results and decide industry standardisation based on that.
jdw64 5mo ago
[dead]
elictronic 5mo ago
Because you are dealing with the physical world where those different designs have different requirements that can conflict. It’s like saying all software is basically the same, why don’t you just abstract it all and run it on these Raspberry Pi’s. You can do that, but it’s going to turn out poorly.
bee_rider 5mo ago
I sort of expected this to happen with tightly coupled customer-customizable chiplets inside a single package, instead. But it seems that packaging is also better left to Intel and AMD, I guess.
IshKebab 5mo ago
> Multiple prototype designs could be grouped together They do this, it's called a multi-project wafer (it's on Wikipedia). It doesn't help with lead time of course. As far as I know tape-out cost is a lot cheaper (if your design is microcontroller-scale) but still in the $100k+ region.
jimmyswimmy 5mo ago
The iteration cycles are limited necessarily by the time between tapeout and getting chips off the line to a testable state. Maybe there's a little room to get an in-wafer test probe system built at the fab if each die has a standard pad layout, which would speed up the 'testable state' part of that timeline. But if your timeline is weeks (if only!) to months, there's little utility in being able to make incremental changes on a daily basis. Plus, the only way fab costs become achievable are MPW runs which don't have adequate demand for multiple daily runs. The ones I've used run a few processes each month, rotating between most of them on a bimonthly to quarterly basis. They just don't fill up fast enough. But I'm small time fabless so maybe I'm missing something.

TheJoeMan 5mo ago

Regarding hardware, it's not entirely true that it doesn't need maintenance/development. See "stepping" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepping_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepping_level. There are sometimes ways to tweak the masks to fix a "silicon bug".

pjc50 5mo ago
Yes, but that still costs significant money in a way that software deployment doesn't. IME most chips get maybe one or two metal layer revisions then a rev B consolidated bugfix - and then get left alone.
- Espressosaurus 5mo ago
  Yeah, my experience has been exactly that. And the person paying the bills will try as hard as possible to avoid/delay a metal rev as possible because they’re expensive and time consuming so they blow up the schedule if you can’t release the chip with rev. A. One place I worked at did fast iteration by pushing as much of the risk as they could off the silicon and by using several distinct ASICs instead of a single monolithic one which would have had better performance on its own. Gave them the ability to rev the different parts at the rate they needed it at a cost to software complexity and hardware compatibility and cost.

pjc50 5mo ago

To add to this: the downstream customers also hate change, just as much as people hate Windows updates. They much prefer being able to buy the same chip for 10 years. (here at Medium-Size-Fabless-Semi-Inc, I'm in the middle of revving a bunch of parts that are about 10 years old, not because we want to add new features to them but because the process node is so obsolete it's becoming difficult to fab. Yes, they're getting new features, but that's not the primary driver of business) On the other hand, because parts are physical objects, you can charge money for them. Piracy is .. not nonexistant (ask FTDI) but not a major concern. There are some interesting corners for rapid-rev electronics, but there's a decision tree: - can I do this with a microcontroller? - if not, how about an FPGA? - ok, there really is no alternative to ASIC, is the market size enough to support that?

alefalfa 5mo ago
I find it ironic how different the culture is between software and hardware people. This makes me very happy about my decision of going into software
- nickff 5mo ago
  What is ironic about this? I am not trying to be difficult, I just don't understand. There is definitely a huge gap, where hardware people spend a great deal of time creating and testing things, that they then want to manufacture for long enough to pay it back. It seems like on the (web) software side, people want to try something out (maybe over a weekend), launch it quickly, then shut it down when they figure out it's not going anywhere (the Google approach).
- idiotsecant 5mo ago
  Yes, the feeling is apparently mutual based on this post
jdw64 5mo ago
Your perspective is much more refined than mine, and I'm learning a lot from it. You come across as a senior programmer in the exact same industrial equipment field as me. Thank you for taking the time to comment

goobatrooba 5mo ago

Pharma companies developing new molecules spend millions to patent all chemicals close to their target chemical, to avoid that a competitor might be able to jump in with a similar product. This is before they even know whether it works. If variation is cheap why not run directly 5-50 versions of the chip and see which works best?