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by someguydave 2899 days ago
>If you want to fix electronics, find a way to make VLSI fabrication cost $500 and have a 5 day turnaround.

Agreed. The root problem is that producing chips has become so expensive and proprietary that it has become extremely centralized. I would bet that no more than a few hundred people decide the big design questions of the chips in nearly all computers produced today.
1 comments
slededit 2899 days ago
It's worse than that. As a new player I can't even get my calls answered.
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someguydave 2898 days ago
How much did you pay for the VLSI software tooling?
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bsder 2898 days ago
It's not relevant. The reason why all the semiconductor companies are buying each other is that it is more cost effective than trying to pry a design win out of somebody's hands that might or might not result in volume.

Or, more directly, someone who already has the design win can probably undercut your price and still make a profit (don't have to redesign anything so all the NRE is already sunk). So, if you want the design win, you have to take an initial loss and then hope you can squeeze the cost of the chip to gain some profit. Not a good bet.

The pot of money for semiconductors is effectively fixed for right now so companies are going to just keep eating one another until that changes or governments step in.

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slededit 2898 days ago
In our case we're an FPGA shop looking to transition. There really needs to be a support group for people like us. We have a hard time figuring out what's even feasible.
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bsder 2898 days ago
There used to be companies like that. Unfortunately, the market for that is so small that it simply isn't worth it and they all died.
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slededit 2898 days ago
The difference these days is that with the death of Dennard scaling and Moore's law there's a place now for customized hardware. You really can beat Intel and even NVidia now for specialized workloads with FPGAs. Of course you'd be even better with an ASIC which is why we're leaning that way.
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someguydave 2898 days ago
Intel sees this threat which is why they are working to glue an altera asic onto the xeon core. I don't think it's likely they will succeed though.
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