[sdiy] $100 Chip fab service

[Eric Brombaugh]

On 05/01/2018 07:16 AM, Neil Johnson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 1 May 2018 at 12:55, cheater00 cheater00 <cheater00 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So apparently the people behind RISC V want to start a service where you can
>> send your chip designs in and get them made. I wonder if this would be
>> useful for analog.. this could really launch analog synths into the
>> stratosphere. Perfect replacements for old rare chips, great new designs,
>> better OTAs, oscillators, envelopes, amps... sounds almost too good to be
>> true, so there's good reason to follow this.
>>
>> Bear in mind this has loads of transistors.. so you could easily fit
>> multiple (16? 64?) complex synth voices plus fx plus a micro to control them
>> on one $100 chip and have all sorts of IO, too (probably best muxed as a
>> single serial line to use as few pins as possible)
>>
>> https://hackaday.io/project/152709-itsy-chipsy-make-your-own-100-chip
> 
> It is supposedly 180nm.  In which case forget about anything above a
> few volts (typically 1.8V, or maybe up to 5V if you really push it).
> 
> http://www.onsemi.com/PowerSolutions/content.do?id=16678

Also - $100 gets you 1/64th of the whole die and *no* I/O pins (you must 
share the common power/SPI/JTAG buses).

Thanks, but if I'm going to have to do everything digital anyway I'll 
stick with cheap FPGAs - at least there I can iterate a design without 
blowing a hundred bucks for every pass.

Eric