Re:Chipforge opensource foundry [pdf]
by baybal2 on Monday October 01, 2018 @02:02PM
(#18115153)
Even 600nm is commercially viable for specialty applications, 300nm for low-end general purpose, and their aim is 180nm. So there is nothing about the process itself that disqualifies it.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Heck, with immersion lito you can even use DLP chip(s) with 405nm and then-trivial multi-patterning to the 180nm... likely even close to 130nm, but that's a stretch that might be too hard on the compensation. This sort of node, with no minimum order quantity and pricing within 2~5x of mask-based fab (slightly slower steppers at these scales, but 600nm might be still reachable in 2 minutes on a 12" for the exposure if you use some resonance or so to get sawtooth-motion of the head to e.g. compensate for a spinning wafer (think like a record/CD player unless viewed in slow motion). Resonance is surprisingly easy to keep steady-state with just a piezo and maybe another one if needed that provides all high frequency content that's not handled by the fundamental and 2 or 3 low harmonics of the scan frequency.
There are applications thanks to modern automation as far as hard-wired logic instead of a via mask ROM, and this should be able to eat much of the low-end FPGA business due to even just much higher design flexibility.