Boy, that’s some “Towers of Hanoi” business, isn’t it? Imagine a monastic group dedicated to this. “Our goal is to use the Lego Turing Machine to render all frames from John Romero’s speedrun of Doom level 1. And then the universe will end.”
I'm not sure what you're asking. IDT used the same gate array for numerous 7400-series products. As a result, simple chips would waste most of the die, while complex chips would use most of it. The tradeoff is that using a gate array saves design costs, although each chip is more expensive to manufacture due to the wasted silicon. Since IDT was selling into low volume, price-insensitive markets (military), the tradeoff was worthwhile.
I may be dating myself here but I seem to recall Intel offering a hobbled 486 processor in which the math processor was disconnected for no other reason than marketing. Regarding the Gate array Technology it seems we've come full circle with the new risk V processors being offered up at incredibly cheap prices.
Why use a $20 Arduino when you could have just gotten a $1 custom PCB, $0.50 microcontroller, and a handful of jellybean parts to do the same job? Because one costs less in Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) than the other, you'd have to design the schematic and layout and then select parts that are affordable and available. Sometimes its just makes more sense to use a reusable component than doing something custom, especially when you don't plan to sell a lot of them. Someone needed a 1-to-4 decoder and for some reason, couldn't find one on the market that fit the application. The Gate Array already existed and was cheap to configure so that's what they went with. It's overkill but so is getting a brand new die made for such a throwaway part of the design.
There's a good chunk of the article about that. "Constant-tile" is a bit of a misnomer, "secret-independent resource consumption" is a better way to say it. If you just add a "sleep(rand)" or equivalent then you can still break the secret using statistics or sidechannel attacks.
Your provider should have a price list. In my experience, the price lists are usually numberprefix, cost. But sometimes cost depends on actual carrier, not original carrier, so you can't know the price until a porting lookup is made, and those cost money too (those are generally a usage tiered $/lookup, starts around 0.01USD at low usage, but can go much lower if you have volume)
