Andy, Re: "Could you please tell me exactly what "tapeout" means."
Sure. Tapeout is a term for the task of completing all of the millions of transistor interconnects on the chip. It is done by engineers on PC's or workstations, using Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) software tools. The reason it's called tapeout is that, in the early days of IC design, before CAE existed, engineers actually put many pieces of tape on a very large piece of paper, where, if there was a piece of tape, it represented a metal interconnect later on. Next, the very large piece of paper, after hours of excruciating checking pain, got shrunk down many times, and it's image eventually was put on glass, which became the mask, or masks. There were some other steps along the way to making the masks, but you get the idea. The old process and the new are completely different, and there is no tape in the new one, but the name tapeout has persisted.
BTW, getting back to the modern era, and to throw in an INTC ad, the workstations used to be all Sun Microsytems or SGI with UNIX OS, and have CAE software from someone like Cadence running. Now, you guessed it, they're all switching to Wintel boxes, I would guess Pentium Pro based in most cases, for the CPU processing power required.
Tony |
