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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Funded by DARPA,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Thousands of students also have learned chip design in MOSIS-associate programs.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Many early MOSIS users were students trying IC layout techniques from the seminal book Introduction to VLSI Design (Template:ISBN) published in 1980 by Caltech professor Carver Mead<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and MIT professor Lynn Conway.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> 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.

See also

• Mead and Conway revolution

External links

• MOSIS web site
• foveon.com - Foveon - Executive Profiles (archived from 2005)