Would you like some cheap chips with that?
uring lockdown I bought three gadgets: a phone, a tablet and a guitar pedal. This wasn’t out of boredom but because the old ones had become unusably slow (phone) or noisy (pedal) or packed up altogether (tablet). I wonder how many VLSI chips that means I bought? I’d guess at least 20, what with phone and tablet SoCs, signal processors in the pedal and heaps of memory. None of these were premium items, all costing under £150, which means they
