[Cryptech Tech] Are zero-NRE low-cost mixed-signal ASICs interesting?

[Bill Cox]

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Sorry about spamming this group, but would like your guys opinions on
a mixed-signal ASIC idea, and some of you guys seem to know a bit
about both ASICs and small volume board production.  If you're also
part of another group I will similarly spam, sorry in advance!

I am trying to find out if there is any need for board-level designers
out there to be able to create small mixed-signal ASICs.  I'm not
talking about an iPod-Nano on a chip, but simple arrays of capacitors,
resistors, transistors, a few logic gates, and maybe some amplifiers.
 The die would be tiny, and each would have the same components.
Designs would be configured with custom routing.  The minimum order
might be 1,000.

So, for example, a chip you could design using say 100 0.1pF caps, 300
6K Ohm resistors, maybe 50 analog N and P mosfets configured for
analog (wide gates), maybe 20-ish T-gates, and 20-ish logic gates
(NAND/NOR/INV), a couple of op-amps, and maybe 16 pads, and come in
some tiny 16-pin surface mount package.  It might even have 1K-ish
gates of real logic, and 128 FLOPs, and even a small block of SRAM, if
people think it should.  The resistors would not be very accurate, but
they would match well.  Same thing for the other components.  It would
come with free design tools, likely based on existing open-source tools.

Something like this I think can be done for under $1/chip, in
quantities of 1,000.  I am trying to figure out if this is a good fit
for helping enable the Internet of Things.  It might be useful for
simple sensor interfaces, for example, or reducing part-counts and size.

Would anything like that be exciting?

Thanks
Bill
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