Re:Amazon Echo Flex Teardown: The Big Silicon
by baybal2 on Sunday January 17, 2021 @05:55PM
(#25816107)
No, even a one man team can do a cookie cutter SoC with hard macros these days.
Mid-tier SoCs of around 2010-2012 period were done by teams of just 20-30 for most of brands on the market.
Only after the mobile market skyrocketed did RnD expenses skyrocket too as market competition started to get serious.
Re:Amazon Echo Flex Teardown: The Big Silicon
by rahimiali on Sunday January 17, 2021 @07:31PM
(#25816849)
1) the age (now?) says “hundreds of thousands”, up two orders of magnitude from this. 2) it’s referring to the WiFi IP core, not the SoC itself, which seems an appropriate estimate. Just reading the 802.11 standard would account for a chunk of that time.
Re:Amazon Echo Flex Teardown: The Big Silicon
by Closi on Sunday January 17, 2021 @06:23PM
(#25816325)
I’m assuming that this one wasn’t just a one man band, doing their own QA and making their own engineering samples.
Looks like the author updated their hours estimate.
Re:Amazon Echo Flex Teardown: The Big Silicon
by baybal2 on Sunday January 17, 2021 @06:30PM
(#25816372)
> I’m assuming that this one wasn’t just a one man band, doing their own QA and making their own engineering samples.
You don't need to do anywhere as much validation if you just assemble hard macros, and other pre-validated circuitry.
It's completely different to make an SoC from scratch on RTL level, vs what I was talking above.
It’s probably in the tens of thousands - one person working on it by themselves for a year gets you to 2000 hours.