Industry Expert Blogs

It used to be simple – you designed your chip, converted the gates to a standard interchange format like GDS, taped out by actually writing to big reels of magnetic tape, and threw the reels at the chip maker. A few weeks later the wafers came back.  If you were happy to pay a few more tens of thousands of dollars, then you could send copies of the tape to another chip manufacturer to get continuity of supply and to play the competitive pricing game. (OK – the step labelled “design your chip” was, even in the good old days, a slightly more complex step than “first catch your hare.”)

But this is no longer the case.

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