/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>1728621
>babby chip designers in university

Okay, I took VLSI design back in the day. The classes were held in the research park which was a big PITA. Eventually you'd get to make your own chips (after about 2 or 3 years). Yeah, I dropped out before that.

There are lots of places that can do small runs of things, but those are mostly the research divisions of companies and universities that inherited old-process equipment (homotaxial, huge process size). Apparently IBM can still make powerPCs at their research labs in small quantities after they got rid of their east fishkill fab.

For analog stuff, they used to spend a lot of time dicking around with prototypes. On pic related, those things that look like transistors are called "process parts" where they take wafers, drop the weird transistors they can make on them with their process, and stick pins on them. Nowadays, you'd do a lot more simulation. Fucking up is very expensive.