Mosis

MOSIS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service) is multi-project wafer service that provides metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) chip design tools and related services that enable universities, government agencies, research institutes and businesses to prototype chips efficiently and cost-effectively.

Operated by the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI), MOSIS combines customers' orders onto shared multi-project wafers that speed production and reduce costs compared with underutilized single-project wafers. Customers are able to debug and adjust designs, or to commission small-volume runs, without making major production investments. Fabrication costs are also shared by combining multiple designs from a single customer onto one "mask set," or wafer template. According to MOSIS, the service has delivered more than 60,000 integrated circuit designs.^[1]

MOSIS was created in 1981 by ISI's Danny Cohen, an Internet pioneer who also developed Voice over Internet Protocol and Video over Internet Protocol.^[2] It was based on the revolutionary VLSI design methodology of Carver Mead and Lynn Conway, who pioneered and/or popularized the use of technology-independent design rules and modular cell-based, hierarchical system design, testing this new approach to rapid prototyping and short-run fabrication at Xerox PARC.^[3] One of the first e-commerce providers, MOSIS also launched the "fabless foundry" industry, in which vendors outsource chip fabrication rather than manufacturing them in-house.^[4] Thousands of students also have learned chip design in MOSIS-associate programs.^[5]

Many early MOSIS users were students trying IC layout techniques from the seminal book Introduction to VLSI Design (ISBN:0-201-04358-0) published in 1980 by Caltech professor Carver Mead^[6] and MIT professor Lynn Conway.^[7]^[8] Some early reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors such as MIPS (1984) and SPARC (1987) were run through MOSIS during their early design and testing phases.

References

↑ "MOSIS". https://www.mosis.com/what-is-mosis.
↑ "Danny Cohen Engineered the Internet to Take Flight". Wired. https://www.wired.com/2012/11/he-engineered-the-internet-to-take-flight/.
↑ "Lynn's Story". http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/LynnsStory.html. Retrieved 2018-03-10.
↑ "Information Sciences Institute - Timeline". http://www.isi.edu/about/history/timeline/.
↑ "USC Viterbi School of Engineering : MOSIS Turns 25". http://viterbi.usc.edu/news/publications/uscengineer/2005_fall/mosis_turns_25.htm/.
↑ "Winners' Circle: Carver Mead". http://web.mit.edu/invent/a-winners/a-mead.html. Retrieved 2005-04-28.
↑ "M.I.T. VLSI Systems Design Class". http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/MIT78.html. Retrieved 2018-03-10.
↑ "IEEE History Center - Lynn Conway". 2003-01-02. http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/conway.html. Retrieved 2004-05-18.