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by phlipski 20 days ago
There are startups trying to reduce the time/cost of chip-fab. Atomic Semi is one. Most of the big players have shuttle services which one can use to put a small chip on for fabrication for not a lot of money ~ $10k for a few chips. Tiny Tapeout acts as an OshPark or JLC PCB for chip design using 2 different fabs - skywater's 130nm and IHP's 130nm node. Wafer.space uses Gobal Foundries 180nm (~ $7 per 20mm^2 chip).

At the end of the day the industry has evolved and optimized to stamp out millions of chips a year with very little defects. However that requires a fairly hefty upfront commitment in design/verification time along with a capital commitment to make enough chips to get economies of scale. This breaks down when trying to build small volumes of chips quickly. It's like trying to turn an oil tanker quickly....