Who owns chip designs?

[fiat1100d]

I was wondering about who owns the designs of the various Amiga custom chips today...

It would be nice to have some new batches of them made with state of the art low power technology: these integrated circuits are running very HOT, but the operation would cost A LOT I suppose

[dammy]

Gateway is more then likely the owner of that IP, although any patents are probably expiring.  Last I heard, the masks were destroyed some years ago and I doubt you could find any fab that could handle that elderly of a design.  Wonder if you could get away with putting everything on a single chip (SoC), including the 68K.  However you did it, your looking at alot of expense that probably could not be recouped.

Dammy

[weirdami]

@dammy

I think Jens is doing a one-chipper type deal.

[mrmkl]

I am "under the impression" that after you have designed a "mask set" of a microchip, you will have to pay millions to have it manufactured. If the mask set contains errors, you have to fix them and pay millions, again as starting costs, to have this one manufactured. Then when you start to mass produce, the cost per chip starts to decrease.

Today's FPGA:s are a more affordable choice, as is proven by MiniMig. And J. Schoenfeld's cloning of Amiga chips, not only as a one chip implementation, but more or less each chip emulated by it's own fpga.

[asian1]

> Mask cost etc

Perhaps they can use Structured Array, Platform ASIC or other methods. Xilinx Virtex II Pro had PowerPC 405 cores (up to 4).
Another product: Statix Hardcopy.

http://www.us.design-reuse.com/news/news15168.html