Transistors are crazy cheap on the wafer(chip) level). For example,
take an Intel Atom ($29) for the cheaper version:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-atom-cpu,1947-4.html
The Atom dies all have 47 million transistors - so at this rate: each
transistor is 62 microcents ($6.17 E-7). So giving a conservative
estimate at 50 transistors per gate (provide for routing, power etc),
an enormous logisim circuit with 10,000 gates would cost less than 31
cents ($0.31).
But that's for mass-manufacturing levels, thousands of wafers and
millions of die produced.
The answer you were probably looking for, is discrete devices, which
we CAN build, say on a breadboard or printed circuit board. So you
can look around on DigiKey http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?lang=en&site=US&keywords=
, under MOSFETs, I saw some for about 15 cents, for a single-package
with 2 transistors.
Using our previous size of 10,000 gates at 50 transistors per gate,
our price suddenly jumps to: $37,500. So, that's over 100,000x the
price as before! But this is closer to what we, as students, and not
chip manufacturers, can make. So just update the transistor # per
gate, and the price should be much more reasonable. The $37k is
outrageous, but even just 10,000 transistors (even fewer gates) would
be a beast to assemble on breadboards, or PCBoards, and would likely
span far too much area.
Awesome that you're interested in the manufacturability/costs, and
code in Python.
~Kevin
Post by Jeremy Cowles~cs61c-aw/pub/coster.py file.circ
Where file.circ is your circuit file. The dollar figures are totally made up
right now, but hopefully I will find some real component costs online
somewhere.
Post by Jeremy CowlesI am making a little script to analyze the dollar value/cost of the
circuits created in Logisim. Does anybody know of some source I can use to
find the prices for this stuff? Like the actual dollar value of an AND
gate, or the cost of wire?
Jeremy