What does it cost to make an IC?

Jorge P

I am a bit curious to know what it would cost to have a circuit made into an IC. Say all design is done and paid for, how much would it cost to make the actual 8 pin DIP, or 40 pin for that matter?

Does it depend on the amount of layers/components in the chips circuit?
Are there any companies out that that will make IC's designed by Hobbyists or will they only work B2B?

Mike Green

Assuming that you have some kind of logic design, you have to redesign the whole thing in terms of the structure of the IC itself, what layers you need, how they're interconnected in 2-D and 3-D. Look at some of the Webinars where Chip or Beau discuss the design of the Propeller II chip and the processes (and costs) they're going through.

The production costs depend mostly on the chip area, but also partly on the manufacturing process used (and the feature sizes). The number of package pins adds another fixed cost per chip. A certain number of layers is pretty standard. More than that tends to reduce yields driving up the cost of an individual functional chip.

The very very high cost of producing a chip is part of what has driven the market for FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) and other similar devices (see here). There are mixed signal versions of these that include some analog building blocks as well.

Unknown

Jorge P wrote: »

I am a bit curious to know what it would cost to have a circuit made into an IC. Say all design is done and paid for, how much would it cost to make the actual 8 pin DIP, or 40 pin for that matter?

Does it depend on the amount of layers/components in the chips circuit?
Are there any companies out that that will make IC's designed by Hobbyists or will they only work B2B?

I don't know but some have suggested about half a million dollars or more.

Tubular

Chip Gracey was remarkably frank about the estimated costs of a Prop 2 chip in his talk yesterday.

From what I remember the chip itself $2 or $3, package was about 70 cents, yield losses mean you end up about $5 cost. Thats for a large chip about 5mm square

Unknown

Jorge P wrote: »

I am a bit curious to know what it would cost to have a circuit made into an IC. Say all design is done and paid for, how much would it cost to make the actual 8 pin DIP, or 40 pin for that matter?

Does it depend on the amount of layers/components in the chips circuit?
Are there any companies out that that will make IC's designed by Hobbyists or will they only work B2B?

Years ago, you could look at the size of a semiconductor die and make a good guess about the manufacturer’s cost. This situation is no longer true, even if you understand that a fine-line CMOS process costs more than a 250-nm process and CMOS processes tend to cost less than bipolar or BiCMOS processes (Reference 1). Even if you know the cost of a chip’s process, you still have no idea of the required test time—an important factor because test time is a major component of an IC’s cost.

http://www.edn.com/article/512170-Die_size_does_not_determine_IC_cost.php

I'll stick with the stuff that I'm allowed to say.

There are several aspects to this question. There's raw cost to fabricate, package and test a CPU. Then there's the full cost of everything - from the design team (engineer's salary, building, hardware costs, CAD costs, infrastructure), to the fabrication facility (building, hardware, fab workers),

Someone replied that it's US $1b for the first CPU, and then $10 afterwards. Both of these numbers seem lower than I would have expected. A 65nm fab runs approx. US $3-5b and a CPU takes about a long time to move through a fab and requires lots of technicians, design teams are approx. 250 engineers paid approx. $100k annually for a design that takes 3-5 years to design, Then there's costs like CAD software, computers, etc. things like power and air conditioning. Costs for materials - like fab materials are super-pure so that even fab water is very expensive (when you factor in the filtering needed for it). And lastly there's the cost to package and test the CPU - and the engineers and technicians responsible for this section of the flow.

Lastly, the cost for just a raw CPU is very dependent on yield... if you have a 12" wafer and only get a few working parts off of it then your cost per part will be very high.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=19443922&postcount=11

If you spent a billion dollars on research, you have to recoup that somehow. How many chips would you have to sell and at what cost to break even?

Franklin

Tubular, that's what it costs to make a chip that has been designed. Jorge wanted to know what it would cost to turn a circuit into a chip. That's going to cost much more.

Jorge P

Thanks for the responses, I thought it would have been fairly inexpensive. My thought before I asked the question in the first post was Why dot companies like parallax make an IC of the C3 and pull out to the pins the VGA, AUDIO, POWER, and remaining GPIO's. But I presume they would have to license things like the voltage regulators and MCP3202. Although I think some IC's are released under some public license since they are so commonly used.

I've been trying to find a site that was devoted to open source designs of IC's I stumbled upon a few years ago but I am having no luck. The closest I can find is http://www.openhardware.de/ but it is nothing like the site I was looking for. They do have reference to some of the tools, like gEDA that all the sites I am finding link to. I remember seeing gEDA on the website I am trying to find. Maybe a Google search of all pages that link to gEDA will turn up something.

Anyways, thanks again for the replies.

Jorge P

Hey what do you know, my linksto search worked, I believe it was http://opencores.org/ well the search took me to http://www.opencircuits.com where I found opencores. I am trying to see what it takes to design an IC and this will provide many samples to browse over...

max72

Here they offer space on a wafer for a small number of components, say a sort of batch pcb..

http://www.mosis.com/

Massimo

Cluso99

Has anyone used this service who can provide estimated costs and rough details of what was produced?

Jorge P

max72 wrote: »

Here they offer space on a wafer for a small number of components, say a sort of batch pcb..

http://www.mosis.com/

Massimo

Thanks for the link, I followed a link from that site to http://www.globalchipmaterials.com/visitors/products_visitors_side.htm package supplier and It looks like some SMT components might be able to fit inside some of the empty packages. I am guessing, but there is most likely a minimum order on these but if there isn't I think I'll give it a try if the price is reasonable to me, say $1 to $3 for a single package. Even if an SMT component doesn't fit, it would still be neat to make some art out of it I am going to call the number around 10am eastern time to see if I can get a low quantity of these to play with, i will post again when I find out.

Beau Schwabe

Jorge P,

When I was working at national Semiconductor, we used the Mosis (or Planet) runs all of the time. Tape-Out runs were usually scheduled every month or every other month. I don't remember what the costs were since this was handled elsewhere... out of sight out of mind. But since this was also widely used for the local university (Georgia Tech) to support their IC curriculum I don't imagine that the cost were astronomical although I'm sure they got a student discount.

Mainly what's going to cost you are the number of mask layers required, the technology process you choose, the size of your die, and the package you want to put it in.... and of course how many you want made.

Not to mention, the Layout Editing software you use to construct the design. If you already have a design that works, then most likely you will need to re-design it for the silicon process that you choose. There are FREE layout Editing software packages available, but you need to make sure that the output file generated is compatible with the IC manufacturer you choose. The standard accepted format across the industry is GDSii or Calma. Also with the free layout editors, most of them will have some sort of LVS check (Layout Vs. Schematic), but you will need to build your own DRC (Design Rule Check) that corresponds to the IC technology process that you decide on. ...And while most will have an LVS check, you will still need to properly correlate the process layers to the layers used in your design so that they match what the LVS engine is looking for.

Ken Gracey

The real costs are in the actual R&D, software licensing, engineering (testing, characterization). I think you're asking about fabless companies and their actual manufacturing costs.

A quick look at some of the manufacturing costs:

Depending on the process, design size and overall volume wafers can be from $600 to $2000 each. The number of die per wafers can be 500 to 1000, at least for the products with which I have been involved.

Packaging can cost 5-70 cents per part, depending on whether or not you need custom lead frames or special packages, and whether or not the packaging company wants to handle your business.

Testing can be another 10-30 cents per part. This can vary widely, of course, depending on whether or not you are using machines or manual processes, and the type of testing fixtures that must be made to support the program which could require huge NRE to develop.

The specific processes that a supplier rolls up into their actual costs will also include the appropriate MSL-rating supplies such as bags, desiccant, labels, tubes, trays, etc.

Oh, I didn't mention setup costs. Again, varies tremendously and I won't get into that part except to say you get to pay it again for every time you make a mistake.

Whether or not you fabricate in Europe, USA, Taiwan or China also affects the costs. Working in China could require extensive travel and communication, offsetting any savings. Taiwan is the King of Semiconductor manufacturing.

Perhaps the best way to have your own chip is to learn to program a $1-3K FPGA.

These issues are all serious considerations for a business. The financial barriers to entry are probably 1,000 to 100,000 larger than making and selling a PCB, not to mention the most important part: the design team. It takes a designer (Chip), layout (Beau), software (Jeff) and usually several more engineers come and go the whole time as needed. While Chip will make it look easy to the rest of us, I feel he has very special talents and I've observed them from the time he was a little kid.

Ken Gracey