Chip startups?

I work for one now, it's very challenging

    * very cash heavy(EDA tools, IP license, engineer wage, fab money,etc)
    * very challenging technically(balance of computation, power, size,etc)
    * lots of work needed on the software side(compiler,SDK,optimized libs,etc)

It is in a totally different world comparing to MVP or the lean startup concept.

Hardware(circuit board related) startup is already challenging(cash heavy, logistic challenges,etc), chip startup is 100x more. The later is about more than one hundred people with hundreds of millions investment to just get started.

Lots of cool stuff in the hardware AI space

https://sambanova.ai/ - Enterprise AI and dataflow-as-a-service for established moodels

https://www.cerebras.net/ - AI accelerator, trying to compete with NVidia

https://www.graphcore.ai/ - Another AI accelerator company - UK based

https://femtosense.ai/ - Sparse NNs on very low power chips - cool hardware and software challenges

https://sima.ai/ - ML accelerators for embedded applications

https://ambiq.com/ - Not AI, but low power chips for wireless using some fancy tech that reduces energy leakage

There are dozens more, these are just the ones I've heard of.

Of course there're. Couple of examples:

- https://www.sifive.com/ - RISC-V related company

- https://www.cerebras.net/ - Cerebras (AI accelerator)

Both of categories has other players, these are just two notable examples.

Norwegian chip startups:

- ONiO: Single-chip microcontroller with builtin energy harvesting and radio communication, enabling IoT devices without battery or dedicated charging.

https://www.onio.com/

- Ascenium: Software-defined CPU without an instruction set. Highly parallel architecture with extensive compiler integration.

https://www.ascenium.com/

- Disruptive Technologies: Single-chip compute + sensing with built-in battery for 10+ year operation.

https://www.disruptive-technologies.com/

Semiconductor Engineering does a monthly startup funding report. All are chip industry related

https://semiengineering.com/knowledge_centers/startups/

Likely vaporware at this point, but no discussion of chip startups is complete without mentioning Mill Computing:

https://millcomputing.com/

It would represent a true architectural revolution if it ever actually came to fruition. Lots of past discussion on HackerNews over the decade(!) it’s been under development.

Plug for my startup, Ephemeraltronics.

I'm designing an affordable electron microscope for high schools and small businesses. While that doesn't sound like a chip startup, the long term goal is to create multipurpose tools that enable semiconductor fabrication with electron beam milling and chemical vapor deposition.

https://mythic.ai/ - analog AI inference engines

https://www.uhnder.com/ - radar on a chip

Currently living in a Cambrian explosion of AI chips: https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2019/01/23/2019-a-...

https://tenstorrent.com/

Here's a compiled list of most of them.

https://github.com/aolofsson/awesome-semiconductor-startups

Any chip manufacturing startups? If not Fab, equipment, Fab software, etc?

> I think this falls in the 'sounds like a bad idea' bucket

With enough funding, it's quite a good thing to work on. With Moore's law dead, the odds of success of weird chips got much better.

This thread reminded me of potato semi. which is always a good (but dead serious?) laugh.

http://www.potatosemi.com/

Rivos Inc. A RISC-V startup supposedly with many ex-Apple engineers.

Integrated Reasoning (S22) is building fast hardware for optimization problems.

We currently target AWS F1 FPGA instances, and custom ASICs are on our roadmap.

hn@ir.design

https://ycombinator.com/launches/64273

https://integrated-reasoning.com/

For anyone interested in Ethernet PHYs, we are hiring! IPO'd early 2022, fast growing, and still a start-up environment

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/3108025120/?refId=iI7RO%2...

https://infiniteseconds.com/ ~ IP single-chip, energy harvest, sensing, flexible, low-power, IOT ready, in-house manufacturing, big infrastructure ready. "Paint your Night with Light".

It's been around for a few years now, but probably still considered a startup: https://amperecomputing.com

I worked for Ember for a while which was a startup that produced a ZigBee chip. It'll be hard to target cutting edge nodes but it can work. I left when they were eventually bought by Silicon Labs.

Not chip the microchip manufacturing but the chip in chip design (IC design) space. I'm currently a part of startup in this area.

It's so costly I don't know how other related startups can survive though.

https://pulppantry.com/

https://www.silina.io

I'm working in one right now. www.neureality.ai

I can think of SiFive and Tenstorrent

join a fab

I don't mean to be rude, but you could have Googled and gotten a pretty rich and interesting set of results:

https://www.google.com/search?q=chip+startups

I'm pretty impressed with the number of AI/neural network semiconductor startups right now.