5/21   How hard/expensive is it to get an experimental VLSI chip fabbed,
       assuming it's already designed?  Are fabs on campus accessible?
       Purpose is to win RC5 crack contest, http://www.distributed.net
       \_ For 0.25micron the first Intel chip is only around $250,000. Cost
          goes down drastically with volume. You must be more stupid than
          I thought.
       \_ Check out MOSIS.  Depends on how many wafers you are making,
          the starting min is $10,000  (if ee143 is correct ..)
        \_ SSI's and MSI's cost almost nothing to make in bulk quantities
           and VLSI's shouldn't cost drastically more, although I don't
           think you'll find any luck finding someone to produce one VLSI
           chip for you just for the hell of it.
       \_ Bottom line is: any chip cheap enough to be worth it wont have
          an appreciably performance advantage over running tuned assembler
          on today's butt-fucking fast general-purpose CPUs.