Rim Semiconductor Company (fka RSMI)

[RET_EE]

'427Cobra' -- I believe that I understand your question and will try to provide some insight that may help. Here goes.

Many companies that build Application Specific Integrated Circuits start with a basic physical layout of what is known as a sea of gates or a sea of transistors. The mask set required to build the ASIC to this point is common to all designs and thus saves money and time when compared to a complete design from ground up. However this sea of gates approach is much less efficient in chip area utilization and the resulting integrated circuit is larger and may be more expensive in volume.

The process requires the various layers of metalization interconnect for these gates or transistors to become a functioning ASIC with the desired operational attributes.

The process of converting the FPGA design to the various patterns for the various layers of metal interconnect is NO SMALL TASK even though it is mainly done through using very expensive computer programs. The task can also take a significant bit of design time which equates to up-front non recurring engineering costs. Then there are the metalization interconnect mask costs which are also added to the non recurring engineering costs.

Most of the IC companies that I am familiar with also require a committed purchase of parts from the first run of the wafers. In many cases, the cost is a fixed amount for a fixed number of circuits that is added to the up front engineering costs. The cost for this first batch of parts is somewhat fixed since the production cost needs to be covered for the first run of parts.

Needless to say, the process costs a significant amount of money for all of the non-recurring engineering and mask costs along with the cost of the wafer run that will produce the actual parts.

Once the parts are produced, then the in depth testing and characterization testing needs to be done.

I hesitate to estimate the up front cost because the variables of the design effort dramatically influence the up front costs.

Hope this helps.

The above is just my opinion for what it is worth.

RET_EE