Past time, but progress on the riscv front is amazing. If prototype-scale fab got cheaper I expect we'd see a wave of parts focused on security and auditablity in short order.
The problem isn't that you can't fab for mass production, it's that development costs are very high to get there. Working on an fpga only gets you so far.
I was under the impression that for process nodes you would reasonably use for small smart appliances the fab cost is too high, and certainly not high enough that nobody would pick up the tab if the gadget makers would start to require open IP for their IoT / smart appliance offerings.
There are, and have been a few CPU/MCU upstarts that have actually done shorter runs of silicon, and while they are usually quite well funded, the numbers doesn't seem to be prohibitive at all.
If the need was there for it NOW, fabbing something with existing open ip is quite likely to be 'free money' (or free market share), as the semiconductor industry appears to be entrenched with ip licensing so much that I sincerely doubt that they would be quick to follow suit. If only because any open offering from them would be seen as detrimental to market dominance, and lower the value of ip cross licensing deals.
Unfortunately I don't think the market need is there, and won't be for quite some time. I would love to be wrong though.
Shuttle service costs for small runs of silicon are, for most people in most situations, tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum. My argument is that if the price dropped to the point where it was competitive with FPGAs at prototype scale (eg, 10 parts might cost $1000 but not $10000) then you would see parts on the market built that way quite quickly. I think the proof for that is the number of low volume commercial parts (HSMs, LTE base stations, etc) which carry FPGAs today. Seems the market has already spoken?
