> I always thought that making an ASIC was prohibitively expensive except for the largest companies. How much does it really cost?
Full custom is still quite expensive.
But you can go the route I'm talking about (prototype on an FPGA, then get in on one of the standard runs at a chip fab via MOSIS or CMP or a similar service) for ~10,000 USD for a handful of chips.
I'm sensing some kind of universal price point for bleeding edge fabrication.
Adjusting for time, etc. that's pretty what in cost in 1991 to have a handful of custom boards and firmware built about the TI DSP chips of the day in order build a dedicated multichannel parallel siesmic signal processing array for marine survey work.
Full custom is still quite expensive.
But you can go the route I'm talking about (prototype on an FPGA, then get in on one of the standard runs at a chip fab via MOSIS or CMP or a similar service) for ~10,000 USD for a handful of chips.