Most companies overlook the true cost and complexity of deploying hardware in the physical world - FlyingWire’s innovative approach to deploy-through-material-design could slash that expense to zero.
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.
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