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by nadius 669 days ago
im fascinated with the idea of using the same photomask for different "kind" of ICs
1 comments

Basically everyone does it, the economy of silicon design means it is very often cheaper to make one or just a handful of masks and then artificially disable features to create granular variants inbetween the actual hardware variants. It's also used to salvage defective dies, if the defect is in an optional part of the chip then they can disable that part and sell it anyway.