while the second and others will cost much less. That assumes, of course, that you already have a paid-for and fully-operational foundry and the people to operate it.

The non-recurring engineering (NRE) combined with foundry setup cost for an MSI with power outputs will run about half a million dollars. The assumption underlying such an investment would be that you'll produce 20 million or more such devices and sell them. That's approximately what's required to break even.

If you were to produce a microcontroller, a much more complex device, but without the high-power outputs, you'd pay about $300K for the license, $150K for the foundry setup, and maybe $10K for the first production run, if you were producing, say, an ARM-based ASIC.

The cost for a device such as this one would probably be more, and you'd probably have to sell on the order of 50 million parts to recover the initial costs before you'd see any profit.

Do you really think a university could afford that, just so you don't have to buy a TI or other manufacturer's module? Those Taiwanese 433 MHz modules were listed for as low as $3 US and were about 2 cm square. Have you looked at them?

RE