So, if I am hearing you correctly, someone starting this up would have all the customers they could ever want simply by being easy to use, well documented, and no sales bullshit?
I am not an EE nor do I design chips but I think that the quality of your fab process and the usefulness of your blocks library would be more important success factors in acquiring customers than those you listed.
EE chip designer here. this is 100% correct. just one point to add: quality of fab process as is also doesn't immediately matter. it's a matter of reputation/reliability. Intel for example is trying so hard to gain their reputation back. Fabs don't compromise theor quality for any customer to keep that reputation alive. it's incredibly hard to bring something new and disruptive by a new player. you need deep pockets (10s of billions to burn) and industry insiders to somewhat buy some reputation.
only exception to this is China. it's slightly easier to do this there at the moment. through they often transfer TSMC heavy-weights to manage their fabs.
Also not a chipmaker, but my impression is silicon has tons of institutional knowledge you can’t just find online and I imagine all the upstream vendors are going to be very similar to the fabs you are trying to replace. Unlike software, hardware can’t be bootstrapped with a disruptive idea and the shirt in your back.
no. someone with decades of experience bringing silicon to market maybe, but still no one would change their supply chain for ease of use. there's nothing easy in IC design, for good reason, and the industry learned to deal with it. what the industry values the most is reliability.
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So, if I am hearing you correctly, someone starting this up would have all the customers they could ever want simply by being easy to use, well documented, and no sales bullshit?
I am not an EE nor do I design chips but I think that the quality of your fab process and the usefulness of your blocks library would be more important success factors in acquiring customers than those you listed.
EE chip designer here. this is 100% correct. just one point to add: quality of fab process as is also doesn't immediately matter. it's a matter of reputation/reliability. Intel for example is trying so hard to gain their reputation back. Fabs don't compromise theor quality for any customer to keep that reputation alive. it's incredibly hard to bring something new and disruptive by a new player. you need deep pockets (10s of billions to burn) and industry insiders to somewhat buy some reputation.
only exception to this is China. it's slightly easier to do this there at the moment. through they often transfer TSMC heavy-weights to manage their fabs.
Also not a chipmaker, but my impression is silicon has tons of institutional knowledge you can’t just find online and I imagine all the upstream vendors are going to be very similar to the fabs you are trying to replace. Unlike software, hardware can’t be bootstrapped with a disruptive idea and the shirt in your back.
no. someone with decades of experience bringing silicon to market maybe, but still no one would change their supply chain for ease of use. there's nothing easy in IC design, for good reason, and the industry learned to deal with it. what the industry values the most is reliability.
if they just a had a few hundreds of billions lying around to prop up competitive fabs. absolutely!
Again, the market for this is tiny. How many companies do you really think want a shuttle service?
haha, yeah, I have no desire to enter this space so I really haven't a clue. But I smell potential there; but it won't be me that takes it.
check out Musesemi. There are a bunch of companies doing this as a service.