[sdiy] Designing Analog ICs

[Ian Smith]

I was planning on trying www.mosis.com when the time came.

> Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2011 20:18:03 -0400
> From: tom.corbitt at gmail.com
> To: synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl
> Subject: Re: [sdiy] Designing Analog ICs
> 
> Hit tab and enter too soon..
> 
> $500 to $1000 a part soon becomes a pipedream. You also are not likely
> to get it right the first go round, so you better factor in at least
> two spins. Add in the fact that current process sizes aren't conducive
> to analog chip and you really only have a few choices left. Your best
> bet would be to try to find a university that accepted some old fab
> equipment a decade ago and is still running grad school level training
> on it (even a decade is iffy, you really want 15-20 year old stuff)
> 
> I've been down the road you're on and failed (my dream was to remake
> the lm3909) and I worked for a company that had a fab branch (and gave
> me some margin die space to play with) I got some chips almost kinda
> worked, but there is no way I'd ever be able to afford to make the
> number of chips required to sell them at a hobbyist or boutique price
> level.
> 
> The positive is that most of the VLSI books on the processes and
> designs you would be working on are now thrift store prices. The
> design blocks you need aren't cutting edge, you can pretty much cookie
> cutter them down and they should work (maybe not well)
> 
> Who knows, Jeri (Ellsworth) fabs transistors in her basement, you just
> need to follow in her footsteps and prove me wrong.
> 
>  Tom
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 7:55 PM, Tom Corbitt <tom.corbitt at gmail.com> wrote:
> > For a real custom IC, you're off by an order of magnitude, 100's of
> > thousands would be required Even If you're going with a place like
> > xfab (meaning you're willing to roll your design with their prefab
> > parts) you're talking min 50k plus a wafer. Say maybe 200 to 500 parts
> > yield per wafer just for the die, then add on the wirebonding and
> > packaging, and $500 a part
> >
> > On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 4:36 PM, Joel B <onephatcat at earthlink.net> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Presumably you already have the tens of thousands of dollars and you now just need to brush up on the knowledge? ;-)
> >>
> >>
> >> That is what KickStarter is for!
> >>
> >> given the success of the Rockit 8bit Synth kickstarter project, hopefully someone on the list will start a Kickstarter project to re-release all those Curtis chips in quantity, or at least some really good clones, and get the Analog Synth industry out of the "scavenging for chips" mode.
> >>
> >>
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