How to design and manufacture your own chip [video]

For me, it was exciting, but now it's disappointing. The SkyWorks 130nm that TinyTapeout uses is ancient; they didn't really give away anything of value. The repository for that and the 90nm PDK haven't been touched in over a year. As I said, it's not substantial enough for me to think it's anything more than a PR stunt.

Agreed. Custom design is still prohibitively expensive, and most often not needed. That being said, older process nodes are getting cheaper to the point where the manufacturing cost is feasible. The problem remains EDA tooling, which may very well be the majority of the cost. Without more competition in that space, I don't see Cadence/Synopsys/Siemens bringing their prices down any time soon.

I do mixed-signal, which is mostly transistor-level design (analog), but also a lot of digital - both transistor-/gate-level and RTL.

I've mainly worked on RF transceivers for cellular, but eventually focused on ADC (analog to digital converters) IP that went into a variety of applications.

Pay depends on a lot of things - experience, type of circuit design, company, geography, etc. I've found that hardware engineer salaries on levels.fyi seem pretty accurate. IEEE also does a salary survey that you can pay to access for really detailed searches. You're definitely looking at starting salaries in 6 figures, and it's competitive with, but still below software engineers.

At small scales, I don't think it's profitable to do your own chip design. Many companies who start are just looking to get acquired rather than really sell their own chips.

Not really familiar with FPGA offerings sorry! It's a growing hobbyist area, though, so I'm sure you can find a lot of information on social media, youtube, etc.

I think the only reason to do a custom IC, for now, is if you can't achieve your performance, power, area or price targets with FPGAs, microcontrollers, or other discrete components. It's still impractically expensive unless your volumes are enormous or your margins are very high. Even with a reasonable complex feature set, I think you can do better with individual components. You can get relatively cheap ARM cores, FPGAs, DSPs, microcontrollers, etc. I don't often see companies doing custom ICs for internal use.

That being said, I think the economies are changing. If you don't need a cutting edge process, the tapeout costs continue to come down. The problem that remains, though, is licensing cost of EDA tooling. There is a little bit of competition in that space, but not much. It is growing though, so hopefully that brings prices down.

The thing is, with every chip generation the non recurring engineering costs are heavily swinging towards FPGAs staying competitive at ever higher volumes. If you're happy with a CPU+FPGA combo and want to take advantage of 12 nm but your design fits on an FPGA, then it almost never makes sense to design an ASIC.

Your design would in principle have to be an analog design or something that simply cannot take advantage of smaller nodes i.e. MEMS.

Agreed. There's a great episode on the Microarch Club podcast (#10) about open source tooling and Verilator specifically. While Verilator is in an impressive state, it doesn't get any use by the big players.

  there's no real reason for hobbyists to design a custom IC - anything they can afford to get manufactured could be done on an FPGA.

Except if you work on a mac. No fpga for apple.

Professionally? Don't think there's a realistic path aside from college. EE undergrad (or possible CSE if you're interested in digital design) and these days an MS too. Otherwise, finding free information online. Many MIT and Stanford courses are available online, and there are some YouTube videos too.