On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 07:50:02PM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote: > On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 11:21:54AM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > > My surmise is that we'd need an effort like that, raising $250K, to > > design and go to full-custom fabrication of an FPLA with fully-open > > design. > > Mine is that one can get useful things done without having to spend > ridiculous amounts of money, or even any money at all. Yours is that > you can't. Debian proves you wrong every day. > > There is absolutely no reason why any money is needed for this. Design > the damn thing. Somebody will want to produce it. Manufacturing > companies would *leap* at the opportunity to make widely desireable > chips with zero royalty costs.
Manufacturing an ASIC involves NRE (non-recurring engineering) costs of hundreds of thousands to millions per revision. A manufacturing company is going to need to see a pretty good market before they invest that in an open design. It's not quite the same as getting a run of Debian CDs made for a dollar each. Hamish -- Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>