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Entering an IC industry with $100k-$200k business... Is it real?

Paul2

Well-known member
Hello dear SW members,

How do you think it's real to enter an IC space with such amount of money?

The cheapest part of the industry physically dealing with ICs, backend, and packaging, doesn't seem to be doing too great if you take conventional wirebond, or even low end BGA shops.

Cheapest tapeout of anything sell-worthy will probably take all of it, which is too much of risk for me for sure.
 
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Not so fast.... Eflabless and the OpenLane SDK may hold out the promise of actually reducing the cost of entry to ASIC development. A possible model for you to consider: use your $200K to development some IP and implement a poof-of-concept with OpenLane. Then leverage your success with that to get a second round of financing to implement on a shuttle with a "still modern, but not stupid expensive process" such as 28 or 22nm.
 
Its already there for < $10K on 130nm SkyWater, using the Efabless chipIgnite offering (leverage the open source EDA and community support for no cost as well). If you want to do open source chips you can use the Efabless Open MOW program (sponsored by Google) at no cost - multiple examples already exist. Mike Wishart (Efabless)
 
Not so fast.... Eflabless and the OpenLane SDK may hold out the promise of actually reducing the cost of entry to ASIC development. A possible model for you to consider: use your $200K to development some IP and implement a poof-of-concept with OpenLane. Then leverage your success with that to get a second round of financing to implement on a shuttle with a "still modern, but not stupid expensive process" such as 28 or 22nm.
You can that already do now with the MPW services provided by most foundries and services like Europractice (https://www.europractice-ic.com). You should be able to get a chip on a MPW for $30K-$40K in not so old nodes. This does not include cost for the EDA software, your man hours for designing it and testing the chip that it fulfills the spec.
 
Companies usually hire software development companies to handle the entire software development process. The most common responsibilities of a software development team include: managing the project schedule and coordinating the efforts of the software development team, writing program code by https://mlsdev.com/blog/top-custom-software-development-companies, implementing new software designs, testing various aspect of the software and finalizing the software project. To ensure a smooth collaboration between the software developers and the client, software development teams have regular meeting which involve the whole software development team, including the management, developers, testers and customer representatives.
 
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