ASIC costing.

The cost of a chip divides into two parts: non-recurring engineering (NRE) and per-device cost.

Item	Cost (KUSD)	Total (KUSD)
6 months : 10 H/W Engineers	250 pa	1250
12 months : 20 S/W Engineers	200 pa	4000
1 Mask set (45nm)	3000	3000
n 8 inch wafers	5	5n
TOTAL	5	8125 + 5n

For small quantities: share cost of masks with other designs e.g. MOSIS offers multiproject wafer (MPW).

Chip cost versus area

The fraction of wafers where at least some of the die work is the `wafer yield'. Historically yields have been low, but was typically close to 100 percent for mature 90 nm fabrication processes, but has again be a problem with smaller geometries in recent years. The fraction of die which work on a wafer (often simply the `yield') depends on wafer impurity density and die size. Die yield goes down with chip area.

The fraction of devices which pass wafer probe (i.e.~before the wafer is diced) and fail post packaging tests is very low. However, full testing of analog sections or other lengthy operations are typically skipped at the wafer probe stage. Assume processed wafer sale price might be 5000 dollars:

Area	Wafer dies	Working dies	Cost per working die
2	9000	8910	0.56
3	6000	5910	0.85
4	4500	4411	1.13
6	3000	2911	1.72
9	2000	1912	2.62
13	1385	1297	3.85
19	947	861	5.81
28	643	559	8.95
42	429	347	14.40
63	286	208	24.00
94	191	120	41.83
141	128	63	79.41
211	85	30	168.78
316	57	12	427.85
474	38	4	1416.89