Chip design has become a very complex endeavor involving teams of engineers. The one man shop is done.
Analog or digital? I know of several microcontrollers that are one-engineer designs. Digital VLSI is basically programming. But in one sense its got to be true as developing processes is a whole separate strand of design and no IC can be made without a process.
Back in the mid-1980s, there was a company in Tucson by the name of Analog Systems. I was never clear on how many chips they designed but they did bin the NE5534, NE5532, and either the TL-07X or maybe the LF35X series.
The MA-332 was a NE5534 with internal compensation (a single NE5532) that met the following specs:
+-20V slew rate, 5nV noise, +-22V DC power
The MA-362 was a drop in for any NE5534, gain of 5 minimum, +-12 to +-17V/s slew rate, Noise measured at 10 Hz and 1 kHz and put on the spec sheet - 2.5 to 4 nv, max DC power +-24V.
They sold a lot of them to the Pro Audio folks in Los Angeles and of course to a few home audio folks that got wind of them.
The MA-332 was a NE5534 with internal compensation (a single NE5532) that met the following specs:
+-20V slew rate, 5nV noise, +-22V DC power
The MA-362 was a drop in for any NE5534, gain of 5 minimum, +-12 to +-17V/s slew rate, Noise measured at 10 Hz and 1 kHz and put on the spec sheet - 2.5 to 4 nv, max DC power +-24V.
They sold a lot of them to the Pro Audio folks in Los Angeles and of course to a few home audio folks that got wind of them.
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With the exception of a few test chips at university, all ICs I have ever worked on (all analogue or mixed-signal) were designed by teams. I never worked on op-amps though, rather on receivers and transceivers.
My colleagues on the digital side normally also work in teams. Sometimes digital back-end design (their equivalent of layout) is done by one person, but then there are one or more other people doing the digital front end.
That's a conditional hypothetical statement, which does not apply to my factual observation.
Even if the OPA xx134 get cheaper, my point still stands because we cannot turn back time to undo the NE5532's popularity.