Industry Expert Blogs

A couple of years ago, I interviewed the CEO of a small chip company called Adapteva about how they had put together a high-performance processor chip for under $2 million and taped out in only six weeks. Ever since that time, I have wondered about the conventional wisdom that a modern ASIC has to cost $30 to $40 million.

Then, at DAC2012, I ran into blogger JL Gray. After we had chatted for a while, he posed an interesting question: "Can you build a chip for $10,000?" He said that he meant designing and implementing the entire device, all the way to prototype, including any tools. Now, my initial reaction was that the cost point he proposed was ridiculous. However, knowing that building a chip could be achieved for much less than the conventional wisdom, I thought this would be an interesting topic to research.