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Re: 65816's

> Another reason FPGAs are getting more popular for new designs.
> The other reason is the cost of masks approaching $1M.
>
> -- glen

$1M for the spear head in cmos technology is the low end.
These are funny projects if all the development costs are dwarfed by
the cost of the maskset :-)

The presure to be first time right is high, very high .

But we are talking about 0.6um ,one mask is arround $1000 and therfore
a mistake does not cost your job.

By the way , just shrinking does not do the job.
You may shrink the digital part but the perifery with the ESD
protections and the analog parts are not.

As I assume that WDC is using a foundry like TSMC the pad libraries
are provided by the foundry and some rerouting has to be done anyway.