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IshKebab 3 hours ago

My guess would be never. The closest you can get is "multi project wafers" where you get bundled with a load of other projects. As I understand it they're on the order of $100k which is cheap, but if you actually want to design and verify a chip you're looking at at least several million in salaries and software costs. Probably more like $10m, especially if you're paying US salaries. And of course that would be for a low performance design.

I think a better question would be "when are FPGAs going to stop being so ridiculously overpriced". That feels more possible to me (but still unlikely).

fc417fc802 an hour ago | parent [-]

Doesn't this vary wildly depending on the process node though? The cutting edge stuff keeps getting increasingly ridiculous meanwhile I thought you could get something like 50 nm for cheap. I also remember seeing years ago that some university had a ~micron (IIRC) process that you could order from.