Itsy-Chipsy: Make your own $100 chip

We went all the way to Hsinchu at Taiwan and visit couple of fabs and meet with senior directors to discuss the ins and outs of the project. After going to different details and receiving feedback, we agreed, in most cases, that fabs-lawyer departments have to check details to do something similar to what has been proposed. 

The most difficult part is related to NDA "aggregation". Although MOSIS and Europractice (EP), have something similar, MOSIS and EP customers are big schools and companies with a lawyer office backing them which give confidence to fabs. Let's put a case. Let's assume 16 makers decide to do their own digital chip and each of them pay U$350 to get a chip. Each maker require to sign an NDA with the fab to get access, even, to a minimum info such as digital library files containing fab info. Getting a NDA signed with UMC, TSMC, Powerchip or similar fabs require to fulfill some conditions from the maker side. 

Although we have had already studied the NDA issue among the outs before visiting fabs, our proposals to solve this issue require full revision from the legal department of the fabs. Brainstorming at the fabs, we believe we have a way to go for the case of digital blocks with a more relaxed NDA. For the analog and mixed signal blocks, there is definitively a longer path and we have to work further details. 

We are looking and putting details together to get a detailed plan to go ahead and start our fist prototype with 16 participants. Considering that we will publish soon a call for participation, we would love to hear from interested people the following: what digital chip you would do with a 350umx350um area in 180nm technology 9-tracks standard cells library using qflow ? Remember that you will have access to supply pins, SPI port, JTAG port and regulators besides the area given. Please leave us a comment with the description of the circuit and give us some insights of your expertise to show us that you can accomplish a successful run. 

Apart from technicalities, we were amazed that competitors are all across the street:

Since the technology war is quite hot, security measures are obviously enforced. We were not able to take a picture even from the parking lot considering security reasons. Even our laptop got cool stickers: