Re: [oc] Volunteer for GPL'd CAD tool

[cottons@concmp.com]

Ruben Leote Mendes writes:
 > As a side note, I read in the slashdot story that getting your own custom
 > chip manufactured in a fab is not very expensive today because there is
 > lots of competition in the market.

"relatively" not very expensive.  MOSIS (www.mosis.org), one of the
cheaper sources of silicon fabrication in small lots, quotes TSMC
.25u/5 metal layer process at ~$1300/mm^2 for lots of 25.  I could
find the virtex die sizes, but I'm sure they are > 100mm^2.

MOSIS works by building masks with several designs, so they share the
mask costs.  The next step would probably be to build dedicated masks,
which probably runs on the order of hundreds of thousands, but
per-device costs would be much cheaper.

Suffice to say, I don't think it is feasible for a open-source project
like opencores to fund an effort like this.

I did have another thought.  I know a number of university groups are
researching fpga place/route algorithms, and fpga architecture.  Do
any of these groups fabricate devices?  Could we get open-architecture
devices from them?

        - Cotton