BayBal, since you're an expert in Semi, I wonder if you can fill in the blanks?
EbenUpton(Raspberry Pi's CEO) , on Twitter:"We get ~20k die per wafer""
A Tsmc 40nm wafer costs about $2300.
How much do you estimate the full chip manufacturing cost for this would be ?
I wonder, because Eben Upton talked about "business model hacking" in regards to this chip, so they may want to do some interesting stuff in the mcu market.
> BayBal, since you're an expert in Semi, I wonder if you can fill in the blanks?
An expert? Ahahh, I never even had formal education in the field, just been trying to enter it, and start studies in it for a few years.
My only real experience with ICs was with a company developing a fancy synchronous rectifier chip what was capable of doing few more tricks with the output waveform besides rectification, and that was mostly just hanging around, and doing complete trivialities like routing, or minimal layout wiggling. I was more useful there as a coffee porter.
> How much do you estimate the full chip manufacturing cost for this would be ?
I don't know how many wafers they buy. I don't know whether they ordered masks from TSMC, or somebody else. I don't know how short they want lead times to be. I don't know if they want to have any device inspection provided. I don't know if they have any agreements on repeated runs, or a flexible capacity purchase. I don't know if they order test, and packaging from TSMC.
From a man who was on Allwinner's original A10 chip team, I heard that the most bare bones 65nm run without mask cost, inspection, or packaging was possible at 1k wafers at $2400-$2500 in 2013-2014 by paying cash 1y in advance.
Today, I'm not even sure if clients are even allowed to, or can order masks on the side these days for latest processes.
The universal advice I heard is that you don't get into 300mm game without at least $10m, or better $20m if you have a brand new, untested design.
The manufacturing cost is tiny. It's .2cm squared, so at 0.05 defects per cm^2, you expect to lose about 0.2% to defects. So-- die manufacturing costs are 2300/(20000*.996) == around 11 cents.
Small run packaging, along with distribution costs, etc, will dominate.
The real cost is amortization of R&D and mask costs.
Don't forget software costs. Raspberry Pi foundation is known for excellent software and Pico seems to be intended that way too.
And that's money well spent, I think. If I'm a hobbyist and am planning on using a grand total of three microcontroller boards, than paying $2 x 3 for "blue pill boards", and then spending hours and hours debugging some obscure problem... that doesn't look like all that great of a deal, compared to paying $5 x 3 and making some use of polished examples and a nice build system:
EbenUpton(Raspberry Pi's CEO) , on Twitter:"We get ~20k die per wafer""
A Tsmc 40nm wafer costs about $2300.
How much do you estimate the full chip manufacturing cost for this would be ?
I wonder, because Eben Upton talked about "business model hacking" in regards to this chip, so they may want to do some interesting stuff in the mcu market.