[StormChaser_5]

I work at a company that does these sorts of custom ASICs for a variety of customers all the time. $5M for the second example is a bit low but the right ballpark. Even allowing for 2 mask sets (mistakes happen) and $1-2M for an off the shelf bluetooth IP it would be difficult to see this going much over that.

I'd estimate a team size peaking at < 10 over 12 months to go from initial specification discussion to GDS-II. Another $1-1.5M for qual and support through production plus silicon validation.

Put that all together and <$7M sounds to me like a good estimate and I've seen a lot of more complex projects come back for less.

Not wanting to be a gobshite here but how did you manage to spend >$20M for something like this? It sounds like you were being seriously ripped off if you were paying $1M per engineer for design tools - you might want to push your tool vendors on that next time negotiations come round.

[esmi]

The second example is a medical IoT telemetry device. If the parent’s project had antenna in package I totally believe $20M for the project, especially as it includes rf validation, the bringing it to market part. $1M per engineer is a lot, especially for typical VLSI cad stuff, but possible for some “design” tools. I’ve used some specialized field solvers that cost $500k per engineer. Not sure that AiP in 2017 would’ve required that, but maybe.

[Noone10101]

I agree, there probably were some wastage on our project, but I'm only a lowly engineer so cannot really comment on high level decisions. There were a lot of engineers working on the project, wages tends to drive prices up quickly, and all the ip was developed from scratch. I don't work there anymore, moved to a smaller more nimble outfit. Thanks for your insight