wafer.space is a silicon manufacturing service that aims to dramatically increase the accessibility of custom chips – think OSH Park but for custom silicon.
The service currently offers access to the GF180MCU open source technology. Priced at $7,000 USD for 1,000 parts (with options for chip-on-board packaging and undiced wafers), the first run can currently be purchased through Crowd Supply. You can develop designs using a fully open source flow or use more traditional proprietary tooling.
Even more exciting is that Tiny Tapeout is in the process of porting their infrastructure to the GF180MCU technology, so there will soon be a way to prototype a small design for under $200 USD and then go to low volume manufacturing with wafer.space!
Welcome to the forum, Tim! This is such and exciting move for the community and I really enjoyed having you on the show to talk about it
As Tim mentioned in the show, it should be super easy for folks to get started with @mattvenn’s courses and making a first chip, and then they can dive into building larger designs for their company or a kickstarter of their own. I am set too do the course myself before Tim is on the show again
I don’t see anything on the website about test - does the process somehow ensure 100% yield? I think the cost is likely to be much higher when test development is factored in.
Being an old 180nm process the yield is pretty high (like >99% for most designs). We also don’t plan to returning die from the more problematic regions of the wafer (edge / partial reticle shots).
Unlike in high volume silicon manufacturing you only have a thousand parts (instead of millions), so testing the part after integrated onto a PCB is a valid strategy.
Maybe in the future when we have some open standards and file formats for testing in this space we can offer something as part of the service.
