if only small businesses could realistically design their own chips 😞

and just to be clear, i'm not even talking about the skills necessary to design chips. i'm talking about the money required. it seems pretty out of reach for any small company without gobs of VC funding

If your requirements can be met with an older node it isn't completely out of reach. The MPW/ChipIgnite program tries to show that

Yeah - 10 grand for 130 nm is pretty good - I mean, it’s not going to be a youtube chip, but I did a lot of good work with IBM’s 130nm when it was cutting edge in the early aughts. I’m super excited for 90 nm being the next cheap option, since that was probably the best all around that was still easy to work with. Things got weird around 65.