Digital DIY in ASIC, the cheap way

[Magnus Danielson]

From: The Proteus <proteus at ugwarehouse.org>
Subject: Re: Digital DIY in ASIC, the cheap way
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2000 13:46:04 -0700 (PDT)

> Not bad - but when the company you work for DOES digital synthesis chips,
> it's kinda hard to sneak something like that in under the radar. 

Yeah, well... if you don't do it on professional basis you have to
take what you can, right? ;)

> A more feasible approach if you wanted to go the ASIC route would be to
> design it in VHDL or Verilog, and then synthesize it for an FPGA. Use the
> FPGA's in whatever you want - but if you ever get the cash to do an ASIC,
> then you go to a vendor that will take your FPGA netlist and VHDL code,
> and resynthesize it to their ASIC platform - most of these guys will do
> this if you buy a large quantity (1,000 to 10,000) with no NRE - which
> otherwise would be something along the lines of $50,000-$250,000 - too
> rich for anyone's blood. :-)

That depends, if you are not very bleeding edge then this migth work,
otherwise you would first of all not find an FPGA big enougth to hold
the design, then you also would like to synthesize to make best use of
the available library and process. FPGAs are so weak on memory that it
is not feasable for some designs.

Hum, ASICs is a bit of from the DIY area I guess...

Cheers,
Magnus