Chip fabrication services for universities in North America and Europe

This paper reviews the chip fabrication services for universities in North America and European countries. One feature of these services is the adoption of a chip fabrication system (called Multiproject Chip) that makes it possible for users at universities to fabricate chips at an extremely low cost. The key idea of the multiproject chip system is that sharing a chip or a wafer among several projects makes it possible to greatly reduce manufacturing costs. The paper covers MOSIS (USA), CMC (Canada), CMP (France), EIS (Germany) and Eurochip (Europe) services. Those services have clearly been making great contributions to increasing the expertise in LSI design at universities.