Compare that to the lead time of electronics, though. I just started in PCB design which is leagues more time forgiving than silicon design and fab, and even then if a non-generic component I'm designing for goes out of stock, the lead time for a new batch is anywhere from a month to a few years, on average around 4-6 months.
Thinking about the design process, testing and revisions, all the way to fab and then market, we're probably talking years just to see a single design reach your test bench (I'm speculating). Oh and millions, because the major chip fabs only do things in large batches.
Compare this to software. It is, indeed, seconds in comparison.
I'd love for semiconductor fabrication to get fragmented out like it sounds like it will.
Lead time isn't because of some magical bottleneck. It's because of demand and batch size. If university students can somehow decimate the batch size needed per design, and enough groups do this (or find new ways to reduce the process size in order for more firms to do this), and enough of them do it at once to help demand, then the lead time goes down, and so do costs.
The months long lead time is not purely a scheduling/capacity issue though. Producing the masks for these modern processes is very complex and slow. Adding more fabs won't help because because its a latency issue, not a throughput issue.
AFAIK (but never studied the latest processes), making a mask takes weeks. That means that the minimum lead-time on making masks is weeks long, because there is no interdependence between them. But I'm sure this is one of the steps that add up to years on practice, because of production limitations.
Actually making the chips has a higher floor, because every step is interdependent. With a hundred steps, each one taking half a day, we are talking about 2 months here. There are probably more than a hundred, and a few take more than half a day (but many take less than it), so yeah, I'd easily expect a 4 months minimum. What doesn't compare to years at all.
Thinking about the design process, testing and revisions, all the way to fab and then market, we're probably talking years just to see a single design reach your test bench (I'm speculating). Oh and millions, because the major chip fabs only do things in large batches.
Compare this to software. It is, indeed, seconds in comparison.
I'd love for semiconductor fabrication to get fragmented out like it sounds like it will.