MOSIS

MOSIS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service) provides metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) nick design tools and related services which allow universities, government departments, research institutes and companies to prototype chips efficiently and price-effectively.

Run by the College of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI), MOSIS combines customers’ orders onto shared multi-project wafers that speed production and lower costs in contrast to underutilized single-project wafers. Customers can debug and adjust designs, in order to commission small-volume runs, without making major production investments. Fabrication pricing is also shared by mixing multiple designs from one customer onto one “mask set,” or wafer template. Based on MOSIS, the service has delivered greater than 60,000 integrated circuit designs.

MOSIS was produced almost 30 years ago by ISI’s Danny Cohen, an online pioneer who also developed Voice over ip and Video over Ip Address. It took it’s origin from the inventions of VLSI pioneer Lynn Conway, who invented and tested this latest method of rapid-prototyping and short-run fabrication at Xerox PARC. Among the first e-commerce providers, MOSIS also launched the “fabless foundry” industry, by which vendors delegate nick orders instead of relying by themselves factories. A large number of students also provide learned nick design in MOSIS-affiliate programs.

Many early MOSIS users were students trying IC layout techniques in the seminal book Summary of VLSI Design (.mw-parser-output cite.citation.mw-parser-output .citation q.mw-parser-output .id-lock-free a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-free aeco-friendly.svg/9px-Lock-eco-friendly.svg.png”)no-repeatbackground-position:right .1em center.mw-parser-output .id-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .id-lock-registration a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-registration agrey-alt-2.svg/9px-Lock-grey-alt-2.svg.png”)no-repeatbackground-position:right .1em center.mw-parser-output .id-lock-subscription a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-subscription a.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription span,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration span.mw-parser-output .cs1-ws-icon aemblem.svg/12px-Wikisource-emblem.svg.png”)no-repeatbackground-position:right .1em center.mw-parser-output code.cs1-code.mw-parser-output .cs1-hidden-error.mw-parser-output .cs1-visible-error.mw-parser-output .cs1-maint.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration,.mw-parser-output .cs1-format.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-left,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-left.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-right,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-rightISBN 0-201-04358-) printed in 1980 by Caltech professor Carver Mead and Durch professor Lynn Conway. Some early reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processors for example MIPS (1984) and SPARC (1987) were tell you MOSIS throughout their early design and testing phases.