By "not FIB lithography" I meant he isn't using the FIB machine to make shadow masks for photolithography; he's directly using them on the semiconductor, like Alacron. I'm not sure of the brand of his machine.
You'd think FIB milling (and deposition and implantation) should be able to do considerably better than the 28 nanometers you can do with photolithography these days (after investing a billion dollars in your fab, anyway). The de Broglie wavelength of a heavy ion isn't that big.
The eASIC link you give implies, without saying, that eASIC ASICs aren't "cell-based ASICs", but that's what "structured ASICs" are, and WP at least confirms that the Nextreme ASICs described in that link in particular are cell-based.
It's not totally clear to me that eASIC is in fact using FIBs for their prototypes; is that based on you talking to people at the company?
I agree that the per-unit cost for FIB is enormous. I hadn't thought about the possibility of using many beams at once to reduce that cost.
You'd think FIB milling (and deposition and implantation) should be able to do considerably better than the 28 nanometers you can do with photolithography these days (after investing a billion dollars in your fab, anyway). The de Broglie wavelength of a heavy ion isn't that big.
The eASIC link you give implies, without saying, that eASIC ASICs aren't "cell-based ASICs", but that's what "structured ASICs" are, and WP at least confirms that the Nextreme ASICs described in that link in particular are cell-based.
It's not totally clear to me that eASIC is in fact using FIBs for their prototypes; is that based on you talking to people at the company?
I agree that the per-unit cost for FIB is enormous. I hadn't thought about the possibility of using many beams at once to reduce that cost.