Cost of Semiconductor Manufacturing
From Open Source Ecology
- $30M to develop 65nm devices, $500M to develop 3 nm [1]
- $170M to produce 90 nm in Indiana. [2]
- Arduino is 350 nm [3] - 'wouldn't be asking on Reddit if it mattered'
- Original Nintendo was 8 bit. 32 bit microprocessors such as 8 Core 80Mhz are 350 nm [4] - 2006
- $4M design and $200k tooling for 130 nm [5]
- $87M for 200 nm fab [6]
- 65 nm fab - $40M [7]
- Around $1M per machine - with hundreds of such machines. Most expensive machine is $120M. [8]
- $1M for a plant in 1969 [9]
- See process description at 2-8 - each layer requires a tool, each tool is on the order of $1M each. [10]
- 8080 chip made in 1974, first computer - Altair [11]. Note that Intel capital expenses were millions to tens of millions - indicating that fabrication of the earliest chips was only these millions, unless they outsourced. But there were probably no companies to outsource to at that time. [12]. Note that Arduino is more powerful than this. 8080 was a 6000 nm process.
