Flutterby™! : When the chips are down

Went to an event last night to schmooze a bit and see Kris Pister, CTO of Dust Networks speak. Interesting conversation, moderately interesting presentation, I think they've got a reasonable business plan, with some intermediate steps to their final goal that make sense, even if I'm skeptical about their final goal.

It also seems like anyone with a real sized market for what they're building would just engineer the device themselves, for less, so I guess they're hoping that their market stays small enough that they can compete by not having any single customer become large enough to want to redo the engineering. But the rise of ZigBee may throw some kinks in that path.

But the talk about making the leap from a moderate sized surface mount device to a single chip made me perk up when I saw this post from Wes Felter suggesting that if you wanted to get a chip made you should contact MOSIS or ChipX. And MOSIS even provides a sample price list.

I had no idea that such things were so cheap. I think it might be time to learn how to use an FPGA and develop my own CPU core so that I have the technology lying around should the need for a tiny computing device arise.