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
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...
designs.
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. 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. One of the first e-commerce providers, MOSIS also launched the "fabless foundry" industry, in which vendors outsource
chip fabrication
Fabrication may refer to:
* Manufacturing, specifically the crafting of individual parts as a solo product or as part of a larger combined product.
Processes in arts, crafts and manufacturing
*Semiconductor device fabrication, the process used t ...
rather than manufacturing them in-house. Thousands of students also have learned chip design in MOSIS-associate programs.
Many early MOSIS users were students trying IC layout techniques from the seminal book ''Introduction to VLSI Design'' () published in 1980 by
Caltech professor
Carver Mead and
MIT professor
Lynn Conway.
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
References
{{reflist
External links
MOSIS web site(archived from 2005)
Integrated circuits
Semiconductor device fabrication