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item 6: no more custom chips. item 7: everyone can create custom chips in their garage. Color me befuddled...

• wmf 17y ago
  These are predictions about the future, so they don't have to be consistent. IMO one of these is correct and the other is just wishful thinking.
• nvoorhies 17y ago
  In the real world 6 would be more along the lines of "hardly any big custom chips". The whole article does suffer a bit from multiple personalities. How are ASICs going to be too expensive to produce in the future if hordes of Indian engineers will be making them on $50k fabs in their garages and Moore's law will slow down enough that design complexity will no longer increase exponentially with time? Why are the big iron chips still alive if they're dead since they're 1 Billion transistor+ designs?
• UncleOxidant 17y ago
  Being able to create custom chips in your garage is still many years away from being possible... note that the MIT team working on this is aiming for a $50K price for a garage fab, not a lot of people will be able to afford that (startups, yes). I think what the author is trying to say is that in the meantime the whole custom chip thing is in trouble.
  • hughprime 17y ago
    It's cheap enough that anyone with a conceivable need for a chip fab can easily afford one. Regardless of what the article says (it'll be just like youtube!), I can't imagine why random individuals would want to create their own chips, even if they could.
• jws 17y ago
  item 6: no more cutting edge process custom chips. e.g. 45nm item 7: everyone can create custom chips with relatively gigantic feature size which won't be competitive with the 45nm guys, but may be just spiffy for other functions.