[mafuyu]

If I'm remembering correctly, Jeri Ellsworth said in an interview that the CastAR glasses were fabbed on a gate array. I thought it was super cool how they were able to prototype a device on FPGA and get chips fabbed as a consumer electronics startup. It probably makes less and less sense nowadays, with how cheap and capable MCUs have gotten.

[EgoIncarnate]

I think you might be confusing CastAR with the C64 toy stuff she did early on. That was initially FPGA and then converted to custom gate array. If I recall there was an issue in that the FPGA initialzed it's memory and the custom silicon didn't which lead to some heart pounding moments when it failed initial bring up.

I don't think CastAR/Tilt5 isn't doing enough units to justify custom silicon. I believe they settled on the Intel Movidius VPU for the bulk of the glasses "brains".

[mafuyu]

Ahh, yeah I think you’re right. The story left a big impression on me, but I guess not well enough for me to remember the details. :)