Anybody worked with wire bonding machines? Any pros and cons? I have a desire to buy one (it could be found under $10K) to make custom wire bonding for myself and other hobbyists or small businesses (packaging silicon dies into IC packages)
P.S. I'm currently working on my own CMOS chip to be produced by MOSIS and see that IC packaging is an issue (too expensive to be practical for low qty manufacturing)
BTW my 1st batch of CMOS chips was manufactured and mostly working ;)
Currently I'm preparing "silicon proven" public domain library of CMOS building blocks for Magic open source software that I used to design this chip...
Looks interesting how much did you pay for the custom chip job?
MOSIS prices are confidential, but you can always request an automatic quote from their website and then figure out pricing ;)
In my case it was cheapest option - 0.5um CMOS 2x2 mm * 40 with partial packaging into DIP40 :)
P.S. The only problem is they don't bother even do DRC (at least with MOSIS scalable CMOS publicly available rules) - so it's 100% your responsibility that your layouts are doable (they only check automatically for density rule because low density of metal layers and polysilicon may hurt neighboring designs on the same silicon wafer).
P.P.S. Antenna rule violations may burn only your transistors during manufacturing (not neighboring designs) so they don't check it either...