( ESNUG 306 Item 2 ) ---------------------------------------------- [12/3/98]

Subject: ( ESNUG 301 #1 305 #8 )   The Rest Of My Chip Express Nightmare

> I was quite surprised to read the "Crappy Chip Express" email in the
> ESNUG 299.  I think it's not right to publish this kind of message from
> an anonymous source.  Accusing without taking responsibility is not
> what I would expect to be an objective of ESNUG.
>
> I don't believe there is one vendor out there who does not have at
> least one unhappy customer.  So, by letting him voice his opinion you
> may cause a real damage to the company.   Lets say the complainer is
> right (we all know the customer is "always" right...) still the vendor
> should have the opportunity to comment on these kind of strong
> accusations.  I'm glad one of our customers took the initiative to
> respond.
>
>     - Tsipi Landen
>       Marketing Communications Director
>       Chip Express                                Santa Clara, CA


From: [ "FedEx, They Ain't." ]

John, Anon, please!

This is a counterpost to Tsipi Landen's complaint about my original post.

I'm posting this anonynous since it represents an opinion from an engineer
who used Chip Express's fab and not *the company* I did the work for.  
My opinions are my own, plus there's enough people out there who know
me and who I currently work for.  Also, this is a forum for engineers 
to express learnings & comments.  If John was to regulate just "good-
natured" postings, I wouldn't want to read ESNUG since it would very 
biased/censored and "content free".

Here's the rest of my Chip Express horror story, details & all.

Aside from bad documentation on the vector format (the docs say
print-on-change, but your TE's wanted sampled time slots), Chip Express
did an *average* job at providing us a solution for an ASIC.  However, I
wouldn't say we had a successful tapeout.  

In the Chip Express gate array technology, the number of gates is
meaningless, (hence, no truth in advertising) it's the utilization numbers
that makes the difference.  Our design was well under the gate count of 
the CX2001 total gates (100K gates @ 33MHz), but approximated 58% 
total utilization which made it unroutable.  Thus, we spun a month 
of effort of learning that our design couldn't be routed on CX2001 
and another month to resynth it to a beta CX3001 process.  Our design 
routed fine in the (beta) CX3001 process, but we were initially plagued
with Chip Express routing tool problems.  Then someone at Chip Express
didn't provide documentation on the packaging -- the parts were proto
builds, so the epoxy wasn't cured.  This turned one of two proto chips into 
a curled potato chip in the IR oven at board assembly.

In the end, we recieved only *one* workable part (the other part which
passed the tester was destroyed in the epoxy/IR oven fiasco).  The yield hit
was attributed to manufacturing/fab-related issues, but we never did get 
final resolution on why.  We waited over 2 months and Chip Express still
couldn't ship us any working chips.  At that point, we passed the
opportunity to make use of many proto units, canned the project, and
dropped further activity.

Okay, we got dorked using a beta process, so maybe we got what we paid for.
However, when the Chip Express marketing & engineering types initially
came in to discuss our design and issues for the sale, they sold us on the
current cx2001 process and that they could get it to fit and fab in a
*short* period of time.  If we factor in the time we spent doinking around
with the Chip Express-related problems, we could have gone to a
Toshiba/Hitatchi/VLSI/LSI ASIC house and had the *same* turn-around time.
In retrospect, the engineering team believed the sales team and maybe we
didn't do enough homework upfront on the technology to realize the limits
that we were pushing.  I also wasn't impressed with Chip Express's PLL,
clock insertion delays, or the slow pads on CX3001, but unfortunately that's
what Chip Express's laser-programmable or 1-mask technology buys you.

With that said, I was impressed with Chip Express's *effort* to try and get 
the contract done in a somewhat timely fashion and their efforts in 
putting the design on a beta process in order to fill the contract.  Other
departments within this company have had good success with Chip Express.  I
personally would not be sure I'd use them again, but I would recommend
engineers do their homework up front on the technology.

    - [ "FedEx, They Ain't." ]