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Question:  What markets could a small regional chip foundry supply on a profitable basis?

Answer:  There are potentially three such markets. 

The first market is a tool of education. At the present time, there are very few colleges and universities that are providing hands-on experience to electrical engineers in the area of chip manufacturing.  If these facilities were located near one or more technical universities, students could provide the principal labor force to the facility. 

Working in the facility would give them invaluable hands-on experience and also be the best way to educate them on the structure and nature of digital chips.  In addition to being educational, a facility manned by students would also moderate and control the costs of operations.  

A student attending a university where all of his costs are already being met does not require a $30 hourly salary.  Receiving as little as $5-10 an hour while receiving inestimable education would be more than adequate compensation. This would make the second market much more feasible. 

At the present time, it costs $8,000-10,000 to produce a prototype chip in rather old  technologies.  Going into the deep submicron can increase that to $50,000–100,000.  These prices have made it virtually impossible for small start ups and universities to produce working prototypes.  But a facility run by students that are producing circuitry in the 700-1,000 nm range could be very cost effective.

The third market is in embedded processor and massive parallelized computing systems.  At the present time, there are new generations of processors that are presently under design to run purely object-oriented programming. These types of processors could be effective even at slow speeds.

In addition, these processors are being architected in such a way that they can be ganged together by the thousands.  When they are ganged together in these numbers, they will become very effective computing systems. Each system would be considered very ineffectual, but as a whole will produce extremely powerful computers on a very cost effective basis.

Such systems could be tested and initially produced in these old chip manufacturing facilities.  I believe that these three markets would more than cover the needed cost to implement such a facility. 

Finally, if such facilities were to be closely linked to the various technical universities supplying them labor with an aim toward research, it is also possible that new chip manufacturing processes could emerge that would also help expand production and moderate costs. 

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