Ask Slashdot: How Do You Estimate The Cost Of An Algorithm Turned Into An ASIC?

dryriver writes: Another coder and I are exploring the possibility of having a video processing algorithm written in C turned into an ASIC ("Application Specific Integrated Circuit") hardware chip that could go inside various consumer electronics devices. The problem? There seems to be very little good information on how much a 20Kb, or 50Kb or indeed a 150Kb algorithm written in the C language would cost to turn in an ASIC or "Custom Chip". We've been told that "the chip-design engineering fees alone would likely start at around 500K Dollars". We've been told "the cost per ASIC will fluctuate wildly depending on whether you are having 50K ASICS manufactured or 5 Million ASICs manufactured". Is there some rough way to calculate from the source code size of an algorithm — lets say 100 Kilobytes of C code, or 1000 lines of code — a rough per-unit estimate of how much the ASIC hardware equivalent might cost to make? Why do we need this? Because we want to pitch our video processing tech to a company that makes consumer products, and they will likely ask us "so... how many Dollars of extra cost will this new video processing chip of yours add to our existing products?".

This is the wrong question

[Avidiax]

Lines of C code or kB of compiled C code doesn't have any relation to the size/complexity/development cost of an ASIC.

Basically, you should constrain the problem by figuring out what the cost of the cheapest general purpose CPU and associated IO hardware would cost, and then figure what it would cost as a SoC by summing.

The ASIC, to be marketable, needs to either exceed that solution in performance or cost.

You should also look at the cost of ASICs that do similar work, possibly combining several if that's r

Re:

[thegreatbob]

C to HDL converters appear to exist, though I have never used any of them. Might not yield the most efficient use of gates, but I can't think of anything else.