Manufacturing of Microprocessor Chips

Blair Vidakovich wrote 05/29/2020 at 09:51 • 0 points

how much does it cost to get micro-processor chips manufactured?

i can design a RISC-V CPU of sorts, i was just curious as to whether i could start producing my own single board computers

or maybe even a little RISC-V dumb phone

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would it be more effective to do this with an FPGA?

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how did the raspberry pi foundation, or PINE go about doing what they did?

does anyone have any links or any advice?

Discussions

EtchedPixels wrote 06/02/2020 at 01:52

Even what will end up as custom silicon is generally debugged using FPGA first. Sometimes in fact large boards full of FPGAs. Just like in the old days where your custom chip started life as one or more large boards of TTL.

There is also a lot more to chip design than being able to generate the right RTL especially as the speed rises or you need good power consumption. After you've talked to the people who do multi-GHz silicon you go away wondering how the hell your computer even manages to boot 8)

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Martin wrote 06/01/2020 at 13:18

You can get your design taped out on a multi project wafer for less than 50k, but the tools and experts to get your design verified (so that you don't end up with just a shiny piece of silicon) will cost you a lot more.

Better stay with an FPGA, if you really want to learn. There are a few projects out there that build fully fledged RISC-V SoCs using OpenSource tools (GHDL, iverilog, yosys, MyHDL, ...)

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rand3289 wrote 06/01/2020 at 07:35

https://hackaday.io/project/18206-a2z-computer
FPGA based computer

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rand3289 wrote 05/31/2020 at 05:31

ARM has free Cortex-M1 soft IP for FPGAs:
https://www.arm.com/resources/designstart/designstart-fpga

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ivo nerjoda wrote 05/30/2020 at 01:10

hello evreyone i am beignner in this site web can you guys help pls

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Florian Festi wrote 05/29/2020 at 23:11

If you want to play around with CPU design looking at FPGAs is the way to go. Designing a multipurpose CPU doesn't make much sense except as a learning exercise. If you want to do some special purpose hardware starting with an FPGA is still a good idea as you can try out your design that way.

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Jarrett wrote 05/29/2020 at 15:35

Are you wanting to get your actual chip designed? $10k to $10 million, depending on complexity.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation didn't design their own chip, they just designed a PCB around an existing one by Broadcom. You probably don't have the ability to use Broadcom's chips (they don't talk to non-phone manufacturers, really), but Allwinner has some ICs that you could totally use.

For RISC-V, look into the SiFive stuff, I think? Get some of their ICs and design a board around it.

Just a PCB is more like $40 or less, way more economical than trying to do it from scratch :)

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