Zeptobars

Chips made on modern processes are dominated by capital costs. Old chips are made on old foundries, which are fully depreciated and therefore have no capital costs. If you made a 90nm foundry today, then it probably couldn't sell those microcontrollers for less than $100 each, just like a modern CPU.

>why can't existing chip companies, some startup or GM themselves spend $10's of millions building a fab that can unblock $100's of millions of product, and alleviate the shortage?

They can't do it fast enough. Standing up a new foundry takes years under the best circumstances, and today you couldn't do it all, since all the tooling is sold out and deeply backordered. If GM could snap their fingers today and magic a cleanroom into existence, they'd still be waiting a hell of a long time to put tools in it.

Secondly on the price question, microcontrollers just have way fewer gates than a desktop CPU. A dozen registers, a thousand bytes of RAM, a few kilobytes of flash. This makes them physically smaller, which lets you put more on a wafer, and makes the unit price cheaper. The total die area of the ATmega8 is just 7.9 square millimeters... at the 500nm node! https://zeptobars.com/en/read/atmel-atmega8 This gets you 8,100 dies from a single 300mm wafer. (If there are any 300mm foundries at 500nm, which there probably aren't)

Thirdly, what makes you think anyone could build a 90nm foundry at all?

Take a look at a list of foundries:…

Most of the commentators in this topic are probably EE guys, may be I can find my old classmates here, hi guys:-)

Joke aside, AD is probably one of the most profitable companies with unprecedented monopoly on analog components and circuits business. Last week somebody mentioned about Visa and Mastercard duopoly in HN, but with this Maxim acquisition, AD is now the Visa and Mastercard combined while TI is the American Express.

To see how profitable AD is please check this article on the AD's 3rd generation transceiver chip and if you are not reading it, basically it's more profitable than drug [1]!

I am using every single versions of this AD's transceiver chip for my work, now it is in the latest 6th gen. Suffice to say if you're building 5G transceiver you will need AD's 5th gen transceiver. It's probably not an exxaggeration to say that ITU radio/wireless cellular standards' bandwidth actually following the AD's transceiver chips generations since 5G system can be built by the 5th gen chip but not the 4th gen chip (it's for 4G). The closest competitors are transceivers from LT (already acquired by AD) and the Lime Microsystems from Cambridge, UK.

[1]https://zeptobars.com/en/read/AD9361-SDR-Analog-Devices-DAC-ADC-65nm

With exceptions, was reading recently an interesting die analysis/estimate of the costs and margins of manufacturing of the AD9361 chip (a 65nm, digital radio transceiver, introduced 12 years ago and still selling at retail today for $300/$400):

https://zeptobars.com/en/read/AD9361-SDR-Analog-Devices-DAC-ADC-65nm

Relevant quotes (and the current retail price if anything is higher now then when the article was written):

“ Retail price of AD9361 at distributes is 275$, volume price from manufacturer is 175$.

That is quite an impressive added value! For 1,68$ of manufacturing cost we are getting 173,32$ of added value! Even Intel with their x86 or drug cartels could NOT do business like that.”

Of course, the actual margin needs to take into account NRE and other costs (and the above link does get into that) but, in this case, the manufacturing is a tiny sliver of the costs.

And for those who just love seeing silicon dies up and close, you might want to check out these amazing pictures to really put things into perspective:

http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/open-microchip-asic-what-inside-II-msp430-pic-z80

Really cool to see the different designs used in various components, or even compared to other CPUs/MCUs. The pictures above were taken by dissolving off the inline package casing with sulfuric acid. No 8085, but there's a picture of the Z80A available, and you can make out the similar areas to the 8085 (register file, control logic, ALU, etc... the quality is insane, the Z80A picture is 6200x6000 px). There's also some earlier photos at http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/how-to-open-microchip-asic-what-inside if you want some more high-res silicon imagery.

I had some mosfet gate drivers (IR2112) that were really marked as IR2113, a higher tier part. The only real way to tell what you've got is to remove most of the epoxy, then boil the rest in nitric/sulfuric acid. After much mess and fume, you'll be left with the raw die and can inspect the markings. I've done this a couple of times, it's quite cool.

In my experience, most "fakes" are crappier parts marked up to be better, or chips that have failed QA. Rarely do you get a whole clone, although for some very high volume or simple, old parts, it's a bit more common.

If you like this, check out [zeptobars](https://zeptobars.com/en/), they post high quality dieshots, and sometimes fakes.

IR2113/IR2112 die: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6DfBuPwAAA

Elsewhere Hackaday links to a Russian microelectronics company's blog[1], where they decapped real and fake FTDI chips and found that:

"It seems that in this case Chinese designers implemented protocol-compatible "fake" chip, using mask-programmable microcontroller. This way they only needed to redo 1 mask - this is much cheaper than full mask set, and explains a lot of redundant pads on the die. Fake chip was working kinda fine until FTDI released drivers update, which were able to detect fake chips via USB and send only 0's in this case. It was impossible to foresee any possible further driver checks without full schematic recovery and these hidden tricks saved FTDI profits."

[1]: http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/FTDI-FT232RL-real-vs-fake-supereal