5 most expensive chips in the world, which is worth the value of a house

The trade war between China and America some time ago has drawn everyone’s attention to the chip field. There is no need to stress the importance of the semiconductor industry. Ever since chips were invented, they have always been in the center of technological development. And chips are becoming more important with the development of technology. Some people even say that chip technology represents the future. Let's take a look at the Rolls-Royce in the chip industry.

The Xilinx in the United States has an aerospace grade FPGA that claims to have a level 10 radiation resistance and is one of the most confidential chips in the world. It is said that the price of this chip is over than $700,000.

The chips in the following list are the best of the best. Of course, due to the limitation of the author's skill and vision, this list is for reference only, but the price here is basically reliable!
1. XQR5VFX130-1CF1752V

Brand: XILINX
Package: BGA
Usage: Aerospace grade / radiation resistant
Appearance and dimension: bare mm
price: over $170,000
Note: The original price of this chip is about $30,000 to $40,000. But the quoted price from a supplier is about CNY 4 million (about $570,000) due to no supply for this chip.

2. XQR4VSX55-10CF1140V

Brand: XILINX
Package: CLCC
Usage: Aerospace grade / radiation resistant
Price: over $70,000
Note: The original price of this chip is about $25,000. The current market price of this chip has become 3 to 10 times higher. Some people are willing to pay for more than CNY1.3 million (about $190,000), which shows the high value of the chip.

3. XQR2V6000-4CF1144H

Brand: XILINX
Package: BGA
Usage: Aerospace grade / radiation resistant
Price: over 0.8 million yuan
Note: The original price is about $20,000 to $30,000, but the price is about CNY1 million (about $150,000) in Chinese channel market. It is said that there is only one orphan left in China.

4. AT697F-KG-E

Brand: Atme
Package: MQFP256
Uses: Aerospace grade / radiation resistant
Cell Architecture: SPARCV8 high Performance, low Power 32-Bit Architecture
Performance: 86 MIPS (2.1 times Dhrystone’s performance)
Power consumption: 1W at 100MHz
Price: over $100,000

Note: The original factory price is about $20,000 to $30,000, and the market price is between $700,000 to $100,000.

5. TSC695F

Brand: Atmel
Package: MQFP256
Type: Aerospace grade CPU
Appearance and dimension: bare model
Cell architecture: SPARCV7 high performance RISC architecture integer unit
Performance: 20MIPS/5MFLOPS (double precision), the system clock is 25MHz
Core power consumption: 1.0W typical value
Quality level: ESCC and 9512/003 and QML-Q or V with 5962-00540
Price: over $60,000.

Note: The original price is around $20,000 US dollars, and the market price is about $60,000 to $80,000.

Why is it so expensive?

As for chips that are applied in the space and outer space, in addition to have high-speed computing capabilities, they must also have special properties such as radiation resistance. Because the space environment is extremely complex, a large amount of space particle radiation can cause degradation or even functional failure to the on-board circuit, causing a fatal blow to the satellite. Therefore, the problems of radiation resistance have all been transferred to the chip design, but the anti-radiation chip design is a worldwide problem. In addition to the chips’ high-speed computing, storage, logic capabilities, collaborative processing, and many other high performances, several special requirements have been proposed as well,

1, flatness. The current flatness of the chip is far from the requirements of aerospace, so we need special high-precision equipment and higher production packaging level.

2. Reinforcement. The aerospace-class chips must undergo special reinforcement treatment in order to maintain operation in the space. Otherwise, once they are on the star, they will be affected by radiation and particles, and will be disfunctional.

3. heat dissipation, reliability, high temperature resistance. When the circuit is applied on the ground, the release of heat mainly depends on heat radiation and heat conduction; in the vacuum state of space, the heat conduction efficiency is extremely low, and the heat generated by the work of the chip should be released as soon as possible.

Global puzzle
The long research and application period of aerospace models determined the slow update of component products. This may cause backwardness in technology. Even if the price of the high-reliability component is 10 times higher than that of the same commercial product, it will not be enough to make up for the backwardness of technology and the decline in market share caused by slow product replacement. Based on a comprehensive assessment, the military and aerospace high-reliability component market has gradually lost its impact on the component market.

Under this circumstance, US component suppliers have become increasingly reluctant to support a market that requires separate production lines, complex inspection and testing procedures, and relatively high management costs and low economic benefits. More and more traditional suppliers of high-reliability components have gradually withdrawn from the lower-profit military and aerospace markets. At least 12 large component suppliers, including Freescale and Intel, have withdrawn from the military market since 1992.

US aerospace budget
In the United States, 14% of the aerospace component project special funds are used to improve FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays), 12% are used to improved memory and 8% are for advanced mixed-signal circuits. These are the world-class problems of the chips and are also the top billing of the sky-high price chips. In Europe and Japan, there are also heavy funds invested in special funds for aerospace components.

These treasury chips are the technical crystallization of US and European technology workers. Therefore, Americans have strict control over the shipping channels of these chips, even stricter than population control. China is one of the countries that are under control and an important competitor to the United States. So, the price of those chip is expensive on China market.

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