| > MCUs and cyber-physical systems was like this until the Arduino happened I'd say it technically happened when cheap flash based microcontrollers become available. Before you had to have *at the very least* EPROM programmer and eraser (or CRT TV I guess) to even put your code onto microcontroller. Flash based microcontrollers meant all you needed is parallel port and some wires to start programming microcontrollers, dropping the barrier to entry by orders of magnitude if you already had PC to program. Then we had first wave with Basic STAMP and similar making it even easier. Then it was Arduino that exploded it and there were other factors on that too. >So what needs to happen to make this a reality for semi-con? First off, we need cheap, cheap fabrication. I actually looked at public funding in Canada and how that was going to the big name Universities who had their own in-house fab labs (at older process nodes). The costs of someone not in the inside was nuts. The actual cost should be in the 100s of dollars to fabricate a design (considering the marginal costs). Like that. Before making PCB was either doing it at home that took a bunch of time and not everyone wanted to play with chemicals, or expensive to prototype PCB. Now we have extremely cheap low volume PCBs and even well priced low volume manufacturing options. Same thing with 3D printing, went from massively expensive to affordable. The problem really is that it's still a bit profitable to do so for companies doing it, while doing same for chip-making would be oh so much harder unless someone put some SERIOUS R&D into making "industrial chip printer" where each wafer could have different set of chips (packaging I guess could be handled by requiring each submitted chip to have connectors in same place). So no mask but some kind of DLP or similar projector to do lithography (dunno if that even possible for anything in hundreds of nm range, just guessing) |