The wisdom of scarcity: I applied for a resources grant to get my new chip design fabricated. Evidently requests were made for for almost 3 times the available fabrication resources in the upcoming run. Their rationing strategy is interesting: I have been granted space, but my grant is 40% less than requested. On the basis of a few paragraphs describing my project, they apparently concluded that I should be able to do it much smaller. I guess they missed the paragraph about how this was going to be the first decoder large enough for real applications. My granted space is just over half the minimum project size for the US fabrication service. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with this tiny space except make another stupid small decoder that won't demonstrate anything new.