MOSIS
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MOSIS is probably the oldest integrated circuit (IC) foundry service and one of the first Internet services other than supercomputing services and basic infrastructure such as E-mail or FTP.
MOSIS is run by the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California (USC). MOSIS services allowed single IC die to be designed by students and researchers at universities and corporations with internet connections. These "projects" are piggy-backed on commercial manufacturing, with a single wafer or few wafers in the manufacturing boat being a MOSIS wafer and the rest being a company's commercial product.
MOSIS has prototyped more than 50,000 chip designs for businesses, government agencies and universities. Between 1990 and 2003, some 66,539 students have learned chip design in MOSIS-associated programs and a total of 13,734 designs have been realized.
Many of the early users of MOSIS were students using IC layout techniques from the seminal book Introduction to VLSI Design (ISBN 0201043580) by Caltech professors Carver Mead [1] (http://web.mit.edu/invent/a-winners/a-mead.html) and Lynn Conway [2] (http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/conway.html).
Some early RISC processors such as SPARC and MIPS were were run through MOSIS during their early design and testing phases.
External link
MOSIS web site (http://www.mosis.org/)