How to Design a New Chip on a Budget

Re:How to Design a New Chip on a Budget by extrapickles on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @12:42AM (#16322456)

I would say that most digital ASICs have the logic proved in FPGAs first. While automated tools exist to go from FPGA to ASIC they are nowhere near as good as hand layout.

FPGAs are not going away as they fill the nitch where a CPU/GPU is not fast enough, but the quantity of units needed does not justify the cost of making an ASIC. Cheap FPGAs also replace glue logic in smaller run products.

Many different FPGAs exist for different tasks. Some include multiple ARM cores so your FPGA design doesn’t have to waste FPGA space on a processor. A few even have programmable analog sections.

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Re:How to Design a New Chip on a Budget by monocasa on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @02:20AM (#16322803)

I was under the impression that automated layout had gotten a lot better over the past few years. In particular, it's very different than hand layout and works best when you let it go whole hog at a chip, but doesn't really compare well to hand layout on tiny sections.

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