I received a nice flyer in the mail the other day from "Chip Express" (www.chipexpress.com, 800-95-CHIPX). They are offering Laser Programmed Gate Arrays. It appears to be a reasonable way to get some Wiener chips built. As I recall, the Wiener design required about 23,000 gates. Their blurb had the following table in in:
FPGA Gates ASIC Gates 500 Units 1000 Units 5000 Units 40,000 20,000 $77 $45 $10 Not Avail 200,000 $176 $150 $82
First I can buy a 486DX-66 (with fan) for $37, but to make it into a PC takes just a wee bit more. Second, there is a world of difference in speed between a Field Programmable Gate Array and an Application Specific Integrated Circuit. The second is much faster (have heard of up to 200 Mhz) but doubt that you can get there with a laser (probably where the 50 Mhz figure comes from). I suspect you will need to have a mask made first - that is where the real money goes. However lets consider that you are really lucky and the first mask works and you get 100% yield (good chips). Next you need a backplane with an input mechanism to prime each of those chips with the text to break (will assume you have built in the initialization sequences for each chip). Then you need a path to provide the KPT to the XOR at the output, powersupply, RF shielding, and a few other minor items (can probably use a PC for a front end). Then, you need a way to report success but that is trivial. Finally, you need to hope that none of those 5000 chips experiences infant mortality or that you have some scheme to detect if that happens and to which chip (was there BITE in the design ?). Personally, would design the 5,000 to provide possible answers (say 2^32) as an initial step and then push that into a single MasPar or similar. Might find out some interesting things that way while reducing the overall complexity. Just some food for thought. Warmly, Padgett ps couple of people last year were working with FPGAs, I corresponded with them briefly. Why not ask them how my "guesstimates" correlated with their experiments...