Well, it's certainly an interesting concept that a person can make chips "in his own garage", etc.   

I did my own share of circuit design, mostly in the 1970's, designing and fabricating PC boards (That's "printed circuit", not "personal computer", and certainly not "politically-correct"!!!)   I designed and built a constant-temperature-bath with zero-crossing power controller (a task which would have been made trivial with the SSR's (solid-state relays, see Crydom) that eventually became commonplace), a 4-digit frequency counter, a 4 1/2 digit DVM, and my should-have-been-famous "Bellyache I" computer (a play on the name of the Illiac IV computer), with a maximum of about 600 IC's, mostly wire-wrapped.  The latter eventually drove a 6 Mhz Z-80 at 12.5 MHz, a very early example of over-clocking.  I also cooled the Z-80 with a thermoelectric device, that I had bought a few years earlier from a surplus company called "B+F Electronics" in Massachusetts.  Yet another idea that eventually went bigtime, along with my invention of the disk emulator ("solid-state disk"), the "SemiDisk" in August 1980.

However, what I find more useful would be the idea (very old, I realize) that a person or company can design the chips, and then have them fabbed in a custom-wafer facility.  For some reason, the company "Orbit Semiconductor" comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_Semiconductor   

A person could readily do circuit design, presumably today using pre-designed building-blocks, finalize the chip design in software including simulation, and have them fabbed (along with the designs of many other people) on the same wafer, probably with the same pad-layout to enable custom-testing at the fab.   But instead of every chip being identical, each chip design would be repeated a few times over the wafer.  People could go from having a small number of wafer-spots, or many, depending on how big their order was.  

Modern tools (circuit design; layout; simulation; test) should make this process far simpler than it would have been in, say, 1985.

  I think Orbit Semiconductor did this in 1985, making possible the idea of a "fabless" chip company.  

                             Jim Bell