Quote from: Inspector 2211 on March 13, 2012, 05:52:46 PM

Quote from: Wandering Albatross on March 13, 2012, 05:34:48 PM

I'm new to BTC and FPGA. I see lots of discussion and lots of good-intended vaporware. I see the real thing too in ztex,icarus,x6500,bfl. (I miss any?)

But has anyone actually talked with a company that is in the business of creating FPGA designs and products?
I know there are some companies that take FPGA designs and automate the FPGA design to an ASIC product.

I may look into it just for the experience and see what happens. I'm sure some of you here already know where this will take me so chime in.

I envision getting some quotes, settling on one and then crowd funding for that.
Part of the request for the quote will require that the entire design be free (as-in freedom). Will that change the price?

Has it been tried already?

A full custom ASIC at current gate lengths (28 nm, 35 nm, 40 nm, 45 nm) is now several million.

I actually asked a buddy of mine who works as an ASIC designer here in Silicon Valley whether we could just slap Stefan's Verilog code into his Synopsis or Cadence workstation at work, and I'll pay the 25 grand for a multi-project wafer somewhere, and his answer was, yes, he could certainly compile the Verilog code into RTL, and maybe even simulate the RTL, but there's much more to an ASIC than that, for instance the physical layout and physical verification, which he cannot do by himself. Now, if I had two friends at that particular Silicon Valley company, one a Verilog/RTL guy and the other one a physical design guy, maybe it would be possible to "moonlight" this over the course of several months...

But I don't and it isn't.

Hrmf, too bad.