Looks like decent progress being made on cooking up modern replacements for some of the custom chips, too. The prospect of being able to make fully-populated logic boards from off the shelf parts is exciting!
Think of all the chips from then and before then that are becoming rare. The hobbyist and archivist community do their best with modern replacements, keeping legacy parts alive, and things like FPGAs, but to be able to fab modern drop in replacements for rare chips would be amazing.
Things don't have to be ultra modern to offer value.
We already have chips that we're not really able to reproduce, like some of the custom chips and ULA (Uncommitted Logic Array) in older micro computers. The fabs and technology is abandoned, and while we might be able to recreate it the results might not be completely identical chips.
It would be fascinating to find out where some of these parts come from. CuriousMarc had a video sometime ago where he got a batch of exotic HP custom ICs for his HP 9825 from a random seller in China. He first thought they were counterfeit, but after testing and decapping they turned out to be genuine.
I don't think there's any profit in cloning such rare, old chips. Even in China I suspect fab runs are too expensive to justify making old chips for a handful of retro-computing enthusiasts. I think it's more likely these are parts pulled from old boards before recycling or forgotten new-old-stock someone found in a corner of a warehouse somewhere.
I've heard people have decapped these and even recreated (in some fashion) versions of the masks, or circuit layouts. I'd love to figure out how to start a project making actual chips.
I wonder if it's possible to retool production lines to keep going without the chips, then add them later. It increases WIP but we saw this in the 80's with computers; they soldered sockets for those chips then only needed to snap them in to complete the machine.
It is very possible that general availability of chips like this might press the board houses to develop techniques for accessing all the pins. I'm sure that we'll see some competing creative solutions.
Given its popularity in the retro community spares may continue to be available for a long time. You can already get entirely new boards and drop in replacements are appearing for the various custom and out of production chips.
Chiplets are super neat, I see a near future where we can get more standardized packaging and easier integration to drive the cost of developing custom ICs way down.
I really hope that over the next 5-10 years we can get some more advanced manufacturing like microvias, blind/buried vias and via in pad for PCBs at a lower cost to cut down the cost of iteration on hardware design.
Things like KiCad, FreePCB and Horizon EDA have really been crushing it from an EDA point of view from where it was even 3-5 years ago.
The only gripe I have with these packages is the library management, but that isn't really 100% their fault :(
There's plenty of foundries cheaply fabbing chips in "obsolete" process nodes. If the original design from 25+ years ago is available, there's no reason why it couldn't be fabbed today in those quantities.
That is exceptionally cool. They have taken existing best practices in semiconductor fabs and migrated them to an interesting place.
What is missing of course is what their feature sizes are and the part at the end where you cut the die and package it. It is those things that would define the set of things you could put on a single chip.
Modern chips sure, but what about chips from a few generations ago? Do the factories they made 20 years ago for what was then cutting-edge tech still exist and produce things using that era of chip making tech, or have they been modernized?
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