sgm wrote:
IIRC,
there was the additional problem of re-designing the chips using the CMOS technology from the NMOS used in the original chipset. As you probably know, NMOS is more power hungry than CMOS, and it doesn't scale well.
I'd like to add that the Amiga custom chip set was a so-called "full custom design". The kind of flexibility VHDL grants you today was still not within the reach of the designers back in the early 1980'ies, and Jay Miner reportedly designed the chips "on paper". Thus, in order to shrink or integrate the chip set, it would have had to be in a form that would lend itself to adaptation. That sort of thing is possible today: there are companies which will literally reverse engineer your design and cast it into a more malleable shape. But I daresay that this sort of thing was not possible until the mid 1990'ies. And after that there wasn't much of an incentive to do this any more. Even the Amiga custom chip did age and did fall behind technical development, eventually.
