How to find ASIC design houses?

We have to check with my prime contractor (Joerg) first, of course. But tw o time zones are no big deal.

When i was in China as a sub, talking to my prime in the USA and client in Saudi Arabia, it was round the clock communications. By the way, when the factory offers 60nm/200mm, my prime wants 90nm/6". The factory said do yo u mean 150mm? Yes, 6", i said. They said it's hard to find 90nm/6" equipm ents. When we offer to buy the equipments and fly their people to the USA, then they said they can find the equipments. Anyway, we should have just b rought the equipments and held on to them, even for just one batch of 100,0

00 chips.
Reply to
edward.ming.lee
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The design kit generally has a selection of "pads" to be used for this. They contain the actual bonding pads where the wires are bonded on, plus well-tested ESD protection networks. We have always used the pads from the design kits, as they are known to work well on the process. Some of these pads can be used for analog signals, or voltage level translation, bidirectional, input-only, output only, tri-state, etc.

Most design kits have a number of other basic circuit funtions you can evaluate to see if they are acceptable for your use. If not, then you can either design from scratch or tinker with the library functions.

The design kit is provided under NDA from the foundry, generally, and is loaded into your CAD system.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

These pads/macro/library, or whatever it's called, are fine with equivalent processes. However, if we are stacking tier-1 (latest) process chips with older process chips, the secondary tiers foundries might not have the proper functions available.

Reply to
edward.ming.lee

No, just the registers to keep the mux lined up but that can be volatile.

Some companies still ofter older style processes on 6" wafers.

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Yes. I am partially retired though, moving towards volunteer activities and nearly all of it is in fields very far away from EE. Plus at least one full day and another half day of (hard) bicycle riding per week. EE work is nowadays too sedentary for the human body. Almost everything happens in simulations and CAD.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

Digital mux, right? So, there are A2D for the analog signals before feeding the registers? Do you want to come meet in San Francisco next week? We can prepare NDA before going into the details.

Reply to
edward.ming.lee

The mux is analog. The registers are just setting the state of the mux switches (FETs).

Thanks, but this is way, way too early. We are currently doing discrete prototyping and then the management there will have to decide which route to go. I don't think we will be migrating towards IC deisign before late summer as there are also other more pressing projects. We just want to be prepared when that time comes, knowing where more local resources and and so on. That's because none of us is an IC designer.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

OK, will check back later.

Reply to
edward.ming.lee

How many analog channels do you need?

See also: "ASIC Design Party".

Reply to
edward.ming.lee

That's all still up in the air, probably a matrix with dozens of rows and columns.

A party? Do they have good beer? :-)

So far the only semiconductor place that did was, where else, in Bavaria (Germany). They had a vending machine in the hallway with five columns. The first was white lemonade, the 2nd was yellow lemonade and rows 3, 4 and 5 were beer, beer and beer. Everything came in the same brown beer bottles that are customary over there. Which camouflaged it nicely although that wasn't necessary there. You insert a coin, turn a big handle and .. rumble, rumble .. a beer bottle showed up in the hopper. Of course, it was assumed that every engineer worth their salt carried a Swiss Army knife with a bottle opener. I still do.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

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OK, it's just an rough estimate of the scope and complexity of the chip; so , we can have better planning on the design rules. We can go with finer pi tch for smaller and lower power digital cells, but won't make much differen t in analog cells anyway. I guess it's 50-50 Digital and Analog.

Yes, Beer and Pizza for sure.

Reply to
edward.ming.lee

More like 10-90 from a real estate perspective.

I'll see what they want to do. Some prefer to work with a big turn-key house. Personally I prefer to work with a well-connected IC designer or a small team but it ain't my decision. I am gradually retiring and then that designer can take over some of the circuit stuff as well.

We'll bake one this evening. Home-made from scratch as is the bread that goes in before. All baked over almond wood fire outside. The spoils of being self-employed and mostly retired. Some more beer I brewed on Tuesday, that's a regular occurence now.

[...]
--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

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