> You might be too small for the fab to return your calls.

How long till there is a self-service SaaS for this?

It's necessarily an interactive process. They will want an NDA (you generally can't get the fab "library" or even process information without this!). They'll want to do sales work on you. There's enough bits where they will want to check your work and understanding because it reflects badly on _them_ if the result doesn't work in a way which could be deemed their fault. A lot of this stuff already exists for PCB manufacturers and has very gradually been automated into a SaaS, but chip shuttle is a much smaller market than PCBs and will remain that way.

An example list of steps: https://www.usjpc.com/en/ourbusiness/shuttle.php

a couple reasons why this is unlikely anytime soon. one is that the engineering processes between the designer and the fab are still too tightly coupled. some for good reason and some that they want to sell you engineering servives.

the other is that the fab schedule is heavily laced with sales politics. getting a timely slot is largely a factor of how important a customer you are and none about scheduling work. they have as much work as they could ever want.

So, if I am hearing you correctly, someone starting this up would have all the customers they could ever want simply by being easy to use, well documented, and no sales bullshit?

if they just a had a few hundreds of billions lying around to prop up competitive fabs. absolutely!

I am not an EE nor do I design chips but I think that the quality of your fab process and the usefulness of your blocks library would be more important success factors in acquiring customers than those you listed.

EE chip designer here. this is 100% correct. just one point to add: quality of fab process as is also doesn't immediately matter. it's a matter of reputation/reliability. Intel for example is trying so hard to gain their reputation back. Fabs don't compromise theor quality for any customer to keep that reputation alive. it's incredibly hard to bring something new and disruptive by a new player. you need deep pockets (10s of billions to burn) and industry insiders to somewhat buy some reputation.

only exception to this is China. it's slightly easier to do this there at the moment. through they often transfer TSMC heavy-weights to manage their fabs.

> all the customers they could ever want

Again, the market for this is tiny. How many companies do you really think want a shuttle service?

haha, yeah, I have no desire to enter this space so I really haven't a clue. But I smell potential there; but it won't be me that takes it.

check out Musesemi. There are a bunch of companies doing this as a service.

Also not a chipmaker, but my impression is silicon has tons of institutional knowledge you can’t just find online and I imagine all the upstream vendors are going to be very similar to the fabs you are trying to replace. Unlike software, hardware can’t be bootstrapped with a disruptive idea and the shirt in your back.

no. someone with decades of experience bringing silicon to market maybe, but still no one would change their supply chain for ease of use. there's nothing easy in IC design, for good reason, and the industry learned to deal with it. what the industry values the most is reliability.

About as soon as a SaaS self-service to order a piloted jet plane.

Either you're really big and can put serious resources into R&D and production, or you can have a few toy-sized offerings for the lowest end that are only good for highly custom or testing purposes, or you are too small to care.

https://tinytapeout.com/ <-- there is this project ...

What is would you consider the rule of thumb/guideline/standard/considerations for a business needing a custom CPU?

Like what would drive the cost of a custom chip being cheaper than adapting something more of the shelf?