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.
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] and Lynn Conway [2].
Some early RISC processors such as SPARC and MIPS were were run through MOSIS during their early design and testing phases.
External links
MOSIS web site
