Overview of Custom Chips

Over time, it has become possible for almost anyone to create his or her own custom chip. Instead of being limited to just multinational corporations with billions of dollars invested in manufacturing equipment, chip design is now within reach of the average college student or well-equipped home hobbyist.

These new dilettantes can't manufacture their own chips, of course. That still does require billion-dollar chip-fabrication factories. However, it is possible to design your own chip. To make it real, you can either have a big company manufacture it for you, or you can “burn” the design into a blank chip made for the purpose. Either way, it's an opportunity for the budding chip designer to see his or her creation in silicon.

Of course, there are trade-offs, and the trade-offs here have to do with cost, performance, and quantity. The more you're willing to spend, the faster your chips can go. The very fastest custom chips cost nearly $1 million to make, so they're obviously limited to serious customers only; home-brew hackers need not apply. However, if you're willing to sacrifice a little top-end performance, it's entirely possible to make one custom chip for about $100. Even serious companies often make dozens or thousands of prototype chips using low-cost means before committing big money to a high-end chip.

In this chapter, we review the half-dozen options available for making custom chips. We look at the cost, performance, and volume trade-offs required and take a peek into the future of custom chips.

About Custom Chips

Custom and customizable chips come in a lot of different types and categories. For our purposes, we can divide them into three classes. First, we look at field-programmable chips. These are the lowest cost, and lowest performance, option. Next, there are “hard” custom chips that offer maximum performance for high-volume customers willing to pay the considerable price. Finally, there is a new third class of dynamically reconfigurable chips that are just starting to make a mark on the market. If their promoters' claims are true, dynamically reconfigurable chips could be the wave of the future.