“Open source is fundamentally transforming hardware.”

We talk about how lowering costs and increasing accessibility can revolutionize the industry and inspire and empower a new wave of creators.

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Wafer Space

wafer.space arose from the ashes of open silicon leader Efabless; when the pioneering firm shut down, Tim sprang into action, founding wafer.space to fill the void in the open silicon community.

“Cost strategies are key to democratizing hardware.”

In this episode we dive deep on the business model for open silicon, and how wafer.space is learning from history, and building back better.

Wafer space offers silicon to anyone; the platform effectively removes the "wealth barrier" to custom silicon, making it as easy to order a chip as it is to order a custom PCB.

Wafer.space’s second run has just opened up on CrowdSupply, so if you’ve always wanted to create your own semiconductor, now is your chance!

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👉 wafer.space

👉 wafer.space on Github

👉 wafer.space on LinkedIn

👉 Tim Ansell on LinkedIn

👉 John Cole on LinkedIn

This is the story of how one professor led a team of students to design the first chip in Kazakhstan's history, and in doing so, may have birthed a whole new national industry.

TL:DR:

• The Win: Kazakhstan’s first student-designed RISC-V chip.

• The Strategy: Skipping the “fab-first” trap by specializing in verification via Texer.AI and Reasonbase.io

• The Takeaway: Strategy + intellectual capital > Physical capital. You don’t need a fab to own a piece of the global supply chain.

Kazakhstan’s First Chip

Nursultan’s journey began at AMD in the United States, where he worked on silicon verification. When he returned to Kazakhstan in 2023 to teach engineering, he found a desert; the local semiconductor landscape was limited mostly to FPGA programming and encryption devices. When he shared his dream of bringing "real" silicon design to the country, he was met with skepticism. In his own words, he was laughed at. Most people jumped straight to the "billion-dollar fab" problem, assuming that without a massive manufacturing plant, the industry couldn't exist.

Nursultan kept looking for an inspiring project to give his students a hands on project, a project that would move the needle through talent rather than infrastructure. Realizing that the key to developing an ecosystem here needed to start with talent, Nursultan focused in on design and verification. He found his catalyst in the “One Student, one Chip Initiative” from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The program gave him a framework to get started, and after recruiting some enthusiastic students at Nazarbayev University they began designing the first chips.

Through a partnership with a Chinese fab, the team got space on Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) and received back their RISC-V general purpose processor. The project went viral, the media caught on, and the project gained national attention.

The project completely shifted the conversation, as Nursultan puts it,

Before people were laughing . . . but after the chip came back, people started pointing me in different directions and mechanisms . . .

From the beginning, Nursultans’ vision has looked beyond the academic track, with a plan to build something even bigger in Kazakhstan.

Bootstrapping the Ecosystem

Nursultan didn't just want a trophy for the university trophy case; he wanted a self-sustaining industry. To turn this academic momentum into a commercial reality, he and his team launched Texer.AI, a verification company designed to employ the very students who went through his program. Further along, he also co-founded ReasonBase.io, a similar company bridging the SF Bay Area and Astana, to apply verification logic to other industries.

By building a company around the chip’s success, Nursultan has created a “revolving door” between the classroom and the market. Through Texer.AI, specialized publications, and local conferences, he is guiding students directly into high-value engineering roles. This is bootstrapping at its finest: using a single successful project to fund the talent pipeline that will power the next ten projects.

The Verification Specialization

The engine driving this revolving door is a deliberate choice to skip the “fab-first” mentality. The strategy is clever: specialize in Verification. In the semiconductor world, verification is the rigorous process of mathematically proving a design works before a single dollar is spent on manufacturing.

Verification offers a low-barrier, high-margin entry point. It requires mastery of complex tools and logic rather than multi-billion dollar cleanrooms. This “capital-efficient” on-ramp allows a startup like Texer.AI to establish global credibility and attract international partnerships without needing a local factory. By focusing on high-skill employment first, Nursultan’s vision for Kazakhstan is seeding a talent pipeline that is far more essential to long-term growth than any piece of hardware.

Kickstarting a Global Blueprint

This story carries a resonance far beyond Almaty, especially as more nations chase the dream of “semiconductor sovereignty.” Nursultan’s path provides a blueprint for emerging economies: you don’t need a massive capital investment to join the global supply chain.

Innovation can start with niche expertise. By focusing on segments like design, verification, or encryption, a country can build its capabilities incrementally. Shifting the focus away from the “full manufacturing plant” requirement opens doors for any economy with a strong mathematical and engineering foundation to develop a resilient, sovereign industry.

Shifting from the assumption that you need a full manufacturing plant to participate in semiconductors opens pathways for emerging economies to develop a sovereign and resilient industry.

Nursultan’s vision for Kazakhstan, an approach of cultivating verified processor design and leveraging open-source tools exemplifies how targeted, skill-based initiatives create foundational assets for broader industry development.

Kazakhstan’s Future

Ultimately, the future of the Kazakh ecosystem relies on expanding these specialized clusters. By starting with a simple RISC-V processor and moving into complex supply chain applications, Nursultan has proven that the “impossible” is actually just a series of small, iterative steps.

Creating a core niche and nurturing the startups within it fosters a self-reinforcing cycle of talent and investment. Kazakhstan is no longer “ecosystem absent”—it is on its way to becoming a vibrant, sustainable innovation hub, one verified line of code at a time.

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Keeping Up With Nursultan

You can keep up with Nursultan and his sprawling semiconductor empire:

• 👉 ReasonBase on the Web

• 👉 Nursultan Kabylkas on LinkedIn

• 👉 Nursultan on the Web

• 👉 John Cole on LinkedIn

The next semiconductor revolution won’t just sit in a server rack. It will be embedded in drywall, aircraft wings, and bridges.

Imagine adding instrumentation to infrastructure, airplanes, or even your office with a roll of tape that senses, computes, and updates in real time. The underlying devices are fabricated using traditional semiconductor processes. They’re then integrated into a flexible substrate, networked, and deployed directly onto physical surfaces to gather data at scale.

An Aha Moment

Co-founder Mike Chieco reveals how a simple idea, inspired by his three-year-old with tape, evolved into a platform that could reshape industries from data centers to aerospace. Complex concepts like Physical AI and high-density sensing suddenly became tangible. Instead of pitching abstractions, Mike and Mike could toss a roll of tape across the table and let the product explain itself.

University Tech Transfer

FlyingWire is built on technology developed in a university lab by Mike Filler at Georgia Tech. Mike Chieco and I dive into the licensing process: what it takes to commercialize university IP, how he identified the core value, and where the tech transfer system works, and where it doesn’t.

The Bigger Trend: Semiconductors Moving Into Materials

For fifty years, semiconductor progress was defined by shrinking transistors. Moore’s Law, lithography advances, nodes. . . . these were the axis of innovation. Value was concentrated inside the die.

That model is maturing. The next frontier is not smaller logic gates; it’s where silicon lives. Semiconductors are migrating out of boxes and circuit boards and into substrates, surfaces, and structures themselves. Rather than mount hardware onto infrastructure, sensing, compute, and connectivity are being integrated directly into materials: tape, composites, aircraft skin, building surfaces. The real innovation is less about node size and more about packaging.

This shift changes the economics and the industry. Historically, installation labor often exceeded the cost of the silicon itself; embedding semiconductors into materials collapses that friction and unlocks infrastructure-scale instrumentation. It elevates advanced packaging and substrate engineering to strategic importance and opens entirely new TAM categories in aerospace, energy, defense, and data infrastructure. The next semiconductor battleground won’t just be leading-edge fabs, it will be the integration of silicon into the physical world, where chips don’t just power machines, but become part of them.

FlyingWire is compelling precisely because it sits at the center of that transition.

More on FlyingWire

Mike writes about tech transfer, the origins of FlyingWire, and semiconductors more broadly on Substack.

Dispatches From the Frontier

The Second Frontier: Flying Wire

For New Readers: Welcome. These dispatches started as my documentation of searching for the next company to build. That search is over. Now I’m building…

Read more

5 months ago · 3 likes · Mike Chieco

Connect with the founders, and read more below:

• Mike Chieco on LinkedIn

• Mike Filler on LinkedIn

• John Cole on LinkedIn

The Siliconimist

The Siliconimist has candid conversations with semiconductor enthusiasts, about chips, capital, and the geopolitical consequences. We talk to entrepreneurs, investors, technologists and operators that are pushing semiconductors to new heights.

By John Cole

You too can own a fab in your backyard, for just a few million USD . . . we’ll talk about why you should get one.

• InchFab on the Web

• InchFab on LinkedIn

• Mitchell Hsing

• John Cole

Understanding Microfabrication

Microfabrication is an intricate process that allows for the manufacturing of devices and materials at a microscopic scale. Inch Fab is pioneering this field by providing application-specific fabs that drastically reduce the cost and footprint required for traditional fabrication methods. According to Mitchell, their entire fab line occupies just about 100 square meters and costs between $5 to $10 million. This is a significant reduction compared to the billions often required for larger fabs.

The Origin of Inch Fab

In a world of mega fabs, gigafabs, and terrafabs, why’d Mitchell go small? The company's inception traces back to the PhD research conducted by Mitchell and his co-founder at MIT, where the objective was to democratize the fabrication process. They aimed to lower the barriers to entry, enabling more innovators to create at the micro scale.

As Mitchell recalls, their early equipment was often outdated, sometimes requiring the use of floppy disks, showcasing how innovation can thrive even with limited resources.

A Shift in Business Model

We discuss how Inch Fab has shifted its business model from providing foundry services to offering manufacturing lines. This strategic pivot responds to a growing global demand for decentralized fabrication solutions. As industries increasingly seek flexibility and cost-effectiveness, Inch Fab’s model proves timely and necessary.

Democratizing Fabrication

Inch Fab's mission is not purely educational; rather, it aims to empower individuals and smaller companies that may not have the resources to engage with larger semiconductor fabs. Mitchell emphasizes that approximately 80% of current products do not justify the economics of a multi-billion dollar fab, indicating a vast market potential for smaller-scale fabrication. This approach opens the door for innovation across various sectors that previously struggled with high entry costs.

The Future of Microfabrication

Finally, we take some time to discuss emerging trends in semiconductor manufacturing, including the shift towards application-specific designs. The barriers of traditional fabrication are being challenged as new material stacks and innovative designs take center stage. Mitchell notes that the future will likely see more diverse applications and the rise of technologies such as quantum computing and diamond-based electronics.

In this episode:

• How an American executive ended up managing semiconductor fabs in China

• The evolution of China’s semiconductor goals from self-sufficiency to supply chain independence

• The influence of Big Fund initiatives on China’s industry growth

• The effects of US sanctions on China’s technological development and acquisition strategies

• China’s ongoing push for advanced nodes and alternative lithography methods

• The potential for a stable US-China semiconductor balance and future innovation pathways

Resources & Links:

• A Decade in the Chinese Semiconductor Industry, An American Story (Amazon Affiliate Link)

• Connect with Doug LinkedIn

Why are they showing up twice? They play two distinct roles, and appear as:

• Fabless system designers. At the top of the ecosystem, they define workloads, select architectures, and set specs.

• OEMs/platform owners. At the bottom of the ecosystem (or the consumer end of the pipe) they ship and operate the end system.

That dual role changes everything. They’re still customers, but they’re no longer just customers. In short: they don’t just buy chips - they shape what gets built.

How Did We Get Here?

Why did hyperscalers moved into chip design. The “fabless takeover” story is driven by four forces in the industry:

1) Workload-specific performance beats general-purpose

General compute load has gotten heavier, and specialty chips have become increasingly viable. AI training/inference, recommender systems, video, search: the gains come from tailoring compute + memory + interconnect to their workloads. This drives economics, better performance per Watt, per dollar, and total utilization (the hidden killer metric in data centers).

2) The bottleneck is system-level, not chip-level

Once you’re at scale with these chips, and have scaled demand, the limiting factors become memory bandwidth, networking, power & cooling. Owning the silicon roadmap lets hyperscalers optimize the whole stack.

3) Supply chain power & allocation

Custom silicon is also a procurement weapon. If you’re running design in house, it slows down IP leakage. But it can also help secure better terms for purchase, and reduce dependency on IDM roadmaps.

4) Economic capture

If you operate at hyperscale, and you’re looking for a place to deploy capital, you don’t just want margin. You want rent capture via platform control (cloud services, hardware/software co-optimization).

Where is this heading?

Fabless Is Becoming System-Dominant—and Foundries Are Becoming Subordinate.

The center of gravity in semiconductors is shifting away from manufacturing leadership toward system ownership. Hyperscalers will increasingly define the workloads that matter - along with memory, interconnects, and packaging architectures.

In that world, foundries behave less like technology leaders and more like capacity providers, where how fast they deliver may matter more than abstract node leadership. Power accrues to those who control demand at scale, not necessarily to those with the most advanced process.

As a result, foundries compete on reliability, geopolitics, and allocation as much as on nanometers. This dynamic helps explain why companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon can punch far above their weight without owning fabs - and why future semiconductor winners may look more like platform companies than traditional chip manufacturers.

What ASML is actually doing is re-optimizing for speed. Specifically, engineering speed. The company is trimming leadership and management layers in Tech and IT while explicitly adding engineering capacity and reassigning many former managers back into individual contributor roles. That distinction matters.

This is not a retrenchment. It’s a structural signal.

A rare, high-quality talent release valve

For startups in hardware, industrial software, equipment, and deeptech, this creates a short window of opportunity. ASML doesn’t employ generic managers. It employs people who have:

• shipped systems that take years to assemble,

• coordinated multi-physics engineering across suppliers,

• lived inside safety-critical, capital-intensive production environments.

Even if many of the displaced roles skew toward leadership, those individuals tend to have deep technical backgrounds. Some were engineers who were pushed into management as the company scaled. This is one of the cleanest talent inflection points European deeptech has seen in years.

The quiet opportunity: engineering-throughput startups

ASML’s internal language is unusually candid: engineers are spending too much time coordinating, reporting, and managing slow process flows. For startups, this is the most interesting signal of all.

There is growing demand for products that:

• reduce coordination cost in complex hardware programs,

• automate verification, validation, and traceability,

• manage long-lived codebases and configuration drift,

• close the loop between design, test, and manufacturing data.

Not generic SaaS. Not dashboards for executives. Tools that directly increase engineering throughput in environments where mistakes cost millions.

ASML’s move is a reminder that even the most elite industrial organizations are still fighting friction at the seams.

What startup founders do next?

If you’re building in or around the semiconductor stack, these are your opportunities:

• Hiring: Look for ex-ASML talent who owned outcomes, not headcount.

• Product: Sell cycle time, validation speed, and decision quality, not “productivity.”

• Positioning: Frame your company as removing friction from engineering, not adding another layer.

ASML is choosing to fix organizational drag while it’s still winning. That should tell startups two things: first, speed still matters, even at the top of the stack. Second, companies that help engineers move faster will stay relevant no matter where the cycle turns.

If you, dear entrepreneur, are building for that world, the signal is very strong.

Coming to you live from Almaty, Kazakhstan . . .

This is straight out of The Innovator’s Dilemma.

I recently re-watched a lecture by Clay Christensen (author of Innovators Dilemma and a few other masterpieces.

Clay Christensen’s used the steel mini-mills Japan used to take over the steel market to illustrate how incumbents retreat to high-margin activities when new entrants emerge. In his classic steel mini-mills example, Clay Christensen showed how incumbents don’t lose because they’re dumb; they lose because they’re rational. When low-margin entrants attack the bottom of the market, incumbents flee to higher-margin segments. Each move looks smart on a quarterly basis. Collectively, it’s fatal.

As Christen points out, US Steel managers weren’t stupid: Every time a low margin mini-mill came into a market, they were motivated to flee to higher margin markets. If you’re David (mini-mills), you’ve created a situation where Goliath (US Steel) is motivated to run away from you rather than fight you. This is especially true if you’re timeline is quarterly: as a manager, you’re making the smart move away from a highly competitive market.

Today, we see the incumbent DRAM manufacturers starting to retreat to high-margin DRAM products while emergents (CXMT) start with low-margin products and shove high-margin makers out of the market.

But if current memory prices are driven by OpenAi shenanigans, when the bottom falls out of the AI market, which DRAM maker is going to survive? My guess: the state-supported trailing-technology provider will survive, while SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron become the US-Steels of yesteryear. Still large, but strategically hollowed out.

Free Link to WSJ Article covering CXMT.

This podcast was made with AI, and is only holding place here until I get some episodes with real humans up!