His reticle discussion is a bit overblown. They cost nearly a million dollars, the tools that do the layout and backend cost a million dollars, and there's engineers on all sides doing checks and verifications. I'm not saying its impossible to have reticle generation problems, but it isn't some shoot by the hip, maybe it'll work kind of thing.
I'm not sure why they'd say "Everything going perfect, nVidia will have a small, rather imperfect number of NV30 in December". Generally, everything going perfect has a different meaning to me.
It doesn't
necessarily take longer to go from tape out to finished goods on .13 than it does on .15.
Modern testing is done via scan chains, where a pattern is injected into a debug port on the die. This debug port connects to a subsystem that touches every gate on the chip and allows any gate to be set to any state. The die is then clocked once, and the chain is read out, and verified for correctness. This is independant of the logical design--all it does is test that the chip was manufactured without defects. This will separate the wheat from the chaff, when it comes to fabrication errors. (This test, by the way, is run on every single part coming off the production line, even if they've been manufacturing it for years) It takes a couple of seconds per part (though you can test hundreds in parallel), so it is nothing that will take longer on .13 than .15.
Once they know they have parts with no fabrication errors, then they can do functional verification. Just because its .13, doesn't mean the LOGIC is any more difficult to verify (beyond the fact that there is likely more of it).
To sum it up, being a completely new design would increase functional verification time. Going to a new process would cause potential yield issues if the fab did not correctly model the parameters, or doesn't have the process dialed in yet. Its not, however, this giant spaghetti bowl that is so intertwined that it is difficult to seperate the two issues.
Plus, he keeps talking about silicone. What do boobies have to do with the semiconductor business? My experience is quite the opposite.
