In 2016, SiFive blogged about custom chips for under $100K[1]. What does this mean in practice for a business? What does a business get if they give SiFive $100K? Does the business have to give SiFive anything in addition to $100K such as a schematic? What are the steps between giving SiFive $100K and getting physical chips in your hands?<p>> At the workshop, people asked me what it would cost to make a chip with SiFive. The room went quiet … people expected me to dance around the topic (like all other people do). Jaws dropped when I simply said “system architects and designers can get customized chips for less than $100,000” – less than the cost of just licensing most CPUs today.<p>[1] https://www.sifive.com/blog/custom-chips-for-under-100k
In 2016 that would be a E31 core, user-specified amount of data SRAM and icache (also SRAM), XIP from external SPI flash, user-specified number of GPIOs. Possibly integrating some simple customer peripheral IP as a memory-mapped device, or MAYBE with a simple custom instruction as a functional unit, SiFive doing a little NRE on that, and doing a $30k 180nm shuttle run giving ~300 chips.<p>If you could give SiFive your desired peripheral or custom instruction already integrated with Rocket and working on an FPGA (Arty) then you'd get it for under $100k for sure -- if you made SiFive do the work it would rapidly get to be more.<p>Disclaimer: I was an early customer for the HiFive1 (December 2016) and then worked at SiFive from early 2018 to early 2020, but I don't speak for them.
It's worth noting that if you're interested in making your own custom silicon, you can get it done quite inexpensively. It's not a fast process, but if you want to try your hand at building something that is all you, you can!<p>This isn't want SiFive was doing - they're providing engineering expertise. Here you're allowed to put together all your own logic gates into... a thing.<p><a href="https://tinytapeout.com/" rel="nofollow">https://tinytapeout.com/</a>
I took a look at your blog[0]. You aren't going to need a custom CPU. You'll be much better off with something that's already in production, in the market, well-documented and well-tested. Also it sounds like you have a pretty steep learning curve ahead of you.<p>[0] <a href="https://flyingcarcomputer.com/posts/a-new-personal-computer/" rel="nofollow">https://flyingcarcomputer.com/posts/a-new-personal-computer/</a>
Optimistically tagging on here as it's a similar sort of question.<p>Say one lone developer gets a bit carried away with verilog and ends up with a description for a chip. I know there's an odd lot style of thing where you can get your chip drawn on a wafer along with a load of other chips from other people. There's probably a way of getting someone who knows what they're doing to attach wires to it, wrap it in plastic or whatever else is involved in "packaging".<p>Where does one get started with that, and what's the ballpark cost? I'm assuming a fair amount of the OP's $100k is SiFive labour, but I don't know how to guess whether a half dozen custom chips in some sort of packaging is of the order of 10s of dollars or 10s of thousands.<p>(edit: I've done a lot of software near hardware and have a vague idea that uploading the data to tsmc was called "tape out" and involved quite a lot of money, but I also vaguely remember talking to someone at a conference who had chips made as a hobby so there are some pieces missing from my mental model)