[HN Gopher] Semiconductor Startups - Are they back?
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Semiconductor Startups - Are they back?
Author : breck
Score : 69 points
Date : 2021-04-05 03:34 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (semiwiki.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (semiwiki.com)
| ArtWomb wrote:
| I'm very bullish on the entire sector. One incumbent vs startup
| story to watch in the AI accelerator space is NVidia vs
| Lightmatter, If they can realize the cost savings of photonic
| computing it looks like a 5-7x improvement. NVidia's Megatron
| trillion parameter language model requires astounding compute
| capabilities: 3000+ A100 GPUs, And while I don't see GPU
| dominance retreating through 2024 at least, as we get into
| universal translation and global parallel corpora by the end of
| the decade, the limits become apparent. And it probably won't be
| talent, design or money that becomes the bottleneck. But the
| relative difficulty of working with photonic crystals compared to
| the low hanging fruit of silicon that has provided such a
| bounteous harvest for the last 70 years.
|
| https://github.com/NVIDIA/Megatron-LM
| hypervisorxxx wrote:
| No
|
| - someone who worked at a semiconductor startup
| person_of_color wrote:
| I'm at FAANG hardware, and I never know when to leave to join a
| startup for a big payday. In hindsight.. the Nuvia exit was
| pretty obvious :(
|
| Then again, so many other failures.
| nrp wrote:
| As someone who spent five years in Facebook doing hardware
| after an acquisition, my advice is to save enough to be
| comfortable and then apply your passion and knowledge to a
| startup doing something you believe is worthwhile. Worst case
| if it fails, you get to move the needle a bit in a space,
| make useful connections, learn a bunch, and then bounce back
| to a FAANG job.
| person_of_color wrote:
| FRL?
| rektide wrote:
| Exit before validation is so specious
| person_of_color wrote:
| Yeah, it's an expensive acquihire.
| rektide wrote:
| Expensive only means anything if you are not made of
| money: these megacorps are literally made of money.
| What's $1.4B to keep down a possible competitor? To keep
| down someone who may have made their chips generally
| usable? Who may have upstreamed support?
|
| It's just unsatisfying to the world to have absolutely no
| new evidence, no points of data, no benchmarks in
| capitalism, no way to figure out what to expect of
| product, when interesting companies are acquihired &
| their efforts to do good pulled into the spider web of
| megacorp-ism. The world literally learns nor understands
| nothing, after Nuvia got bought. Whatever comes out will
| be a synthetic other. Similar to so many other
| acquisitions. The backing of the larger company changes
| the effort itself, & diminishes the competitiveness of
| the offering.
|
| And the intent to support the thing well, the desire to
| form a solid community: dead. The new corporate largess
| defines the environment for whatever might ship. There
| will be no radical new upstreamings, new mainlinings. It
| will be business as usual, alas, most probably: closed,
| highly proprietary vendor drops. An anti-free anti-
| accessible system of chipmaking, unsupportability-writ-
| large, re-asserting itself, over what might have been.
|
| It seemed the world might get a sip of that sweet
| ambrosia, but now we all sip again as we are permitted
| from the great leadened chalices. Nothing new will be
| offered.
| rektide wrote:
| Anti-trust now (and yesterday too). I can not believe
| that the DoJ ended the anti-trust suit against
| Qualcomm[1][2]. This is such capitol evidence about how
| shitty chip-making is: everyone of potential value gets
| immediately snatched by a colossus. This system is
| poisoned. Why are the regulators doing nothing? Why is
| there no back-pressure against this system of everyone
| being acquired? Nothing new is ever permitted. Everything
| is hideously broken.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26629492
|
| [2]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-29/u-s-
| aband...
| Lramseyer wrote:
| While my experience is mainly in digital hardware, my tinfoil hat
| theory as to why the hardware startup scene is so lackluster is
| because the EDA tools are expensive hot garbage. Not only are the
| dev tools cost prohibitive, but so are the necessary analog
| components like PLLs and PHYs (which are more or less required in
| pretty much every modern VLSI design.)
|
| The same companies that make the EDA tools also make IP blocks
| that semiconductor companies purchase, so it's in their best
| interest to prevent an open source hardware scene from thriving.
| I get that making masks for a chip is expensive for a startup.
| But if the design, verification, and layout steps were cheaper
| and more streamlined, I would bet money that the fab costs would
| work their way down in clever and creative ways.
| baybal2 wrote:
| While EDAs truly are ridiculous expensive garbage, their cost
| is a pocket change in the age of billion dollar startups
| without a selling product.
|
| It's just you actually have to make some working product in
| semiconductors, it's a substantial technical undertaking, and
| thus a big turn off for the aforementioned billion dollar
| internet startups.
| varispeed wrote:
| Isn't that, at least for digital application, many chips can
| be replaced with FPGA, CPLD or just a good old CPU? Only
| recently you can see some companies reproducing audio IC from
| the 80s, but not much of original work. It seems like there
| is a huge niche in that space, but probably companies think
| it is too small to be profitable.
| monocasa wrote:
| The six figure per seat cost of cadence is a lot to the point
| of being unobtainable for even early stage of what would
| become unicorns.
|
| It's not like giant checks are generally being written to
| these startups that have no users and no engineering done
| yet.
| DivisionSol wrote:
| I don my tinfoil hat with you. EDA tools are intentionally
| opaque to maximize IP capture. I have no skin in the game, nor
| do I have hardware/circuit development experience... But every
| time I want to dabble as a Hobby-ist it's clear: "You're not
| allowed to experiment."
|
| Starting that train now is quite difficult. Lots of inertia to
| overcome with pre-existing closed source tools being chosen by
| default at colleges and companies.
| tails4e wrote:
| The EDA tools are often given for almost free to startups, as
| the vendors recognise startups can't start without them, and if
| they are too expensive to a fledgling company they are shooting
| themselves in the foot. Startups get the tools, but not the
| support. I'm in HW chip design and use EDA tools daily, and
| while they are not always great, I would not be as concerned
| about them for a startup as I would getting enough money to
| create the first prototype, fab costs, lab equipment costs, man
| years of engineering, and of course the IP.
| monocasa wrote:
| You need the support though to know why the crappy tools are
| breaking your design and be able to hack around it.
| jbay808 wrote:
| It was sad to see what happened to Touchstone Semiconductors.
| They made some really excellent components with no equal.
|
| It seems like a VC pulled out, they were forced to sell to a big
| company at a terrible price, and then that company discontinued
| all their products shortly after.
|
| https://www.edn.com/touchstone-semiconductor-falls-prey-to-h...
|
| https://www.eetimes.com/touchstone-semi-sells-assets-to-sili...
|
| https://www.silabs.com/documents/public/pcns/EOL-1609091-Tou...
| anonytrary wrote:
| Realistically, what happens to the IP in this case? Can the
| original founders (or new party) just decide to restart and
| roll with the same IP and find new VCs? Is the IP locked up
| forever in the vaults of BigCo? This pattern of "acqukilling" a
| company seems like smelly, sometimes malicious pattern. I know
| that FAANG does this to social startups all the time.
| jbay808 wrote:
| All of Touchstone's patents would have been transferred to
| Silicon Labs, and they still own them despite discontinuing
| all the parts. The founders would probably find it very hard
| to try again.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Yep. Without a contract stating otherwise,[a] the purchase
| of a company generally transfers all IP of said company to
| the purchaser. This is especially true in bankruptcy
| proceedings where a company only buys a bankrupt one for
| the IP (branding/logos, trade secrets, etc.).
|
| [a] For example, an inventor could _license_ their IP (the
| patent or whatever) to a company they create with a clause
| that the license can't be sold (this has varying success
| from my understanding)
| kumarski wrote:
| efabless.com
| gvkhna wrote:
| This would be really great, I think innovations with GaN
| transistors could be something that startups could tackle and I
| would love to hear more about it!
|
| But fab is extremely capital intensive and complex to setup, I
| don't think this is the realm of startups anymore.
| ohazi wrote:
| Basically all of the chip startups from the last 20 years are
| fabless, including the ones that this article is referring to
| ("high" capital costs in the $tens-of-millions vs. $billions)
| Fordec wrote:
| Take the story of Bethleham Steel. Unassailable entrenched
| incumbent in steel production due to high capital costs.
|
| Then a completely new way of steel production came about.
| Nothing iterative about it, a completely different set up that
| came with its downsides but had better economies of scale.
|
| If there is a change to come, it's not by building a bigger fab
| that has higher capital costs. It's by making the idea of a fab
| entirely obsolete by finding a way to bypass all the steps
| involved in the current manufacturing process and producing a
| slightly inferior product in some way but isn't a multi-month
| long process with capital costs measured in $10s of billions.
| Fabless manufacturing was a great boon in its time by changing
| the business model around fabs but it didn't change the
| underlying engineering. Somebody, ultimately, owned a fab in
| the chain.
|
| The real trick will be something that bypasses the whole idea
| of pure crystal ingots as the core of the process that has to
| be processed in batches with 100s of steps. Something more
| continuous and simplified would be revolutionary.
| Hypothetically, imagine instead of growing a perfect crystal
| and etching or doping it, you grew an imperfect crystal but
| that growth was controlled in the direction that got you 80% of
| the way to the layout of the final design. Or imperfections
| were embraced and utilised as a feature for randomised bias in
| AI cores than a flaw that wasn't tolerated.
|
| All of this, hypothetical of course, but my point is even if we
| are at the end of this fabbing game, the _real_ trick is
| creating a completely new game entirely.
| why_only_15 wrote:
| I'm not so familiar with steel - in the Bethlehem Steel
| analogy, is the newcomer you're talking about Nucor?
| Fordec wrote:
| Yep, the mini-mill tech they adopted was pretty disruptive
| at the time because of it's economics.
| GistNoesis wrote:
| I like the idea of yokogawa's minimal fab, which removes the
| necessity of a clean room. It still needs plenty of
| fabrication steps, so you still need plenty of different
| machines and the entry ticket is ~10M.
|
| I'm convinced that there are plenty of design space that is
| not explored. In particular, the fabrication process today is
| mainly 2 dimensional with a very high necessity of control.
|
| If you relax one of this strong constraint and build the
| system bottom-up instead of top-down. It reduces to a search
| for the chemical compound, which can self-assemble into an
| interesting structure. It should look like a biological
| machine but running at computer frequency.
|
| Plenty of nano-computing units interacting. For example today
| we can already build some silicon-nanorobots (
| https://www.electronicdesign.com/industrial-
| automation/artic... ). Give each one a small memory unit,
| processor, and radio-link, and you can build tons of them on
| imperfect crystal using standard process. Then your processor
| is a 3d volume of these bots instead of a 2d-surface. You
| will still be constrained by heat dissipation but if you put
| them inside a liquid, it would be less problematic, but
| you'll have to compensate for nano-processor brownian drift.
| totalZero wrote:
| If you know where the lattice imperfections are, you can
| maybe go around them.
| person_of_color wrote:
| How much raw resources for semiconductors do we have left?
| akiselev wrote:
| Silica, a precursor to silicon wafers, makes up about 10% of
| the Earth's crust by mass [1].
|
| [1]
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/14356007.a23...
| [deleted]
| Fordec wrote:
| Raw resources? You mean Silicon? You mean 27%[0] of the planets
| crust? Yeah, we have a bit.
|
| [0] https://www.rsc.org/periodic-table/element/14/silicon
| adrian_b wrote:
| While the raw materials needed for silicon and silicon
| carbide are extremely abundant, the semiconductor industry
| needs many other elements that are much less abundant, e.g.
| gallium, germanium, arsenic, antimony or hafnium and also
| some that are extremely rare on Earth, e.g. indium, tellurium
| or gold.
|
| The rare elements may be needed as dopants, when they are
| needed in very small quantities for each device, but those
| quantities add to non-negligible values for the entire huge
| production of semiconductor devices.
|
| However, the rare elements can also be the main constituents
| for the so-called III-V and II-VI semiconductors.
|
| The fact that the other better semiconductors require large
| quantities of rare elements has been a very important reason
| that has prevented the replacement of silicon in a large
| number of applications where it is an inferior solution.
|
| For example, the GaN transistors and the white LEDs need not
| only gallium but also relatively large quantities of the much
| less abundant indium, which might limit some time in the
| future the expansion of their applications.
| totalZero wrote:
| > The fact that the other better semiconductors require
| large quantities of rare elements has been a very important
| reason that has prevented the replacement of silicon in a
| large number of applications where it is an inferior
| solution.
|
| Maybe, but silicon is also damn good because of the
| adherence and dielectric nature of its oxide. Not to
| mention that several of the so-called superior
| semiconductors, even if you can get them in large
| quantities, are more difficult than silicon to crystallize
| without many defects. And silicon also conducts heat
| relatively well, meaning that it draws thermal energy away
| from hotspots within a chip better than some of the more
| expensive semiconductors.
|
| Not disputing the larger point about rare metals. Just
| asking you to put some respect on the name of my boy Si.
| adrian_b wrote:
| You are right that silicon has many other advantages
| besides being abundant.
|
| Also correct is that the price of a semiconductor
| material in the form as it enters a semiconductor plant
| depends not only on the abundance of the raw material but
| also on how easy it can be purified and grown into
| crystals with very few defects.
|
| The latter 2 operations are indeed much easier for
| silicon than for compound semiconductors.
|
| Nevertheless, the choice of materials for any
| semiconductor device results from compromises between a
| very large number of properties and while silicon is good
| at some, it is worse at other properties, e.g. energy
| bandgap, breakdown electric field, velocity limits of
| charge carriers, electron mobility, leakage currents and
| others.
|
| So there are applications for which silicon may be the
| best choice, even if the cost of the materials is
| ignored.
|
| However, in more and more applications silicon continues
| to be used only because of its lower cost.
|
| It is likely that the use of silicon for the active part
| of the semiconductor devices will continue to decrease
| and this trend will accelerate.
|
| For example, to make faster CPUs, there are not a lot of
| remaining possible improvements.
|
| Three-dimensional silicon devices are a possibility for
| increasing the multi-thread performance, but only if it
| would become possible to circulate some liquid coolant
| through channels in the device, to eliminate the heat.
|
| Otherwise, the only chance is to use some other material
| than silicon for the active regions of the device.
|
| Even if the active semiconductor devices would be made
| from other materials, it is likely that silicon crystals
| will continue to be used as substrates long after that,
| due to the 2 advantages that you have mentioned, i.e.
| very few crystal defects and high thermal conductivity.
|
| For the record, I have worked for many years in a plant
| where silicon devices were made and I have handled
| thousands of silicon wafers, breaking just a few ;-( .
|
| Therefore, I actually have a lot of respect for your boy
| Si !
| person_of_color wrote:
| Can that be readily converted to silicon wafers?
| peytn wrote:
| You can heat up some rocks with carbon to get silicon and
| CO2, then use the Czochralski method invented in 1915 to
| produce a single giant crystal by essentially dipping a
| stick into molten silicon and slowly pulling it out. Then
| you can slice up that big crystal into wafers.
|
| There's a cool photo on Wikipedia of somebody just growing
| a crystal: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Silico
| n_grown_by_C...
|
| There's a bit of waste, but AFAIK it's not too bad compared
| to other things.
| blihp wrote:
| It's not the raw materials that makes semis expensive,
| rather it's the extensive processing it has to go through
| to get be transformed into the final product. The biggest
| issues with materials I'm aware of are often the 'conflict
| resources' which are in high demand but large percentages
| of the supply are mined in regions that for social and/or
| geopolitical reasons limit supply.
| adammunich wrote:
| Yup
| Fordec wrote:
| To be blunt, yes. It's mostly a function of how much you
| need and applying heat to burn off impurities and separate
| out by weight. Suck out the liquid silicon layer,
| crystalize it, slice it. Boom, wafer.
|
| Sand is used because of the high surface area so lower
| amount of heat needed to be applied, but sand is just
| ultimately worn down rock. Quartz for example is just pure
| oxidized silicon in a non-uniform crystal structure. And
| there's a _lot_ of quartz. Don 't like quartz? It's also in
| the even _more_ common feldspar too. We as a species will
| run out of _water_ before running out of silicon.
| baybal2 wrote:
| No sand goes into silicon production directly.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The raw consumption of resources is tiny: remember that
| semiconductors are tiny objects!
|
| Of more concern are the energy and clean water input, and the
| ability to cleanly dispose of used solvent. Much of the old
| silicon valley factories are now "superfund" cleanup sites
| because of this.
| blihp wrote:
| Of all the natural resources we consume, semis would be the one
| I'd worry the least about. We'll likely run out of many other
| (more vital) things before semis make it to the top of the
| list.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Can somebody more experienced than me chime in and say whether
| Bizen [1] could be worked to be a viable alernative to CMOS at
| least in some niches? While CMOS has accumulated decades of
| improvement, much of it wrt. lithography would be transferred.
|
| [1] https://www.wafertrain.com/index.php/theprocess/what-is-
| bize...
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