Hotte wrote:
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 .
At work, an individual or team responsible for a zero-yield part is spoken of as having "..joined the million-dollar club"! The last two or three generations of CMOS process rely on lithography phase interference effects, and it's tricky to get right when the results vary by distance from the center of the mask.
Fortunately, defective masks are a rare occurrence. Indeed, they pay me to develop EDA applications that ensure they _stay_ that way.
Steve