Jensen Huang

And so we did the math.

There was no chance somebody was going to survive it.

We didn't have that much time to tape out a chip, send it to a foundry, TSMC, get the silicon back, test it, send it back out again.

There was no shot, no hope.

And so the math, the spreadsheet doesn't allow us to do that.

And so I heard about this company and this company built this machine.

And this machine is an emulator.

You could take your design, all of the software that describes the chip, and you could put it into this machine, and this machine will pretend it's our chip.

So I don't have to send it to the fab, wait until the fab sends it back, test.

I could have this machine pretend it's our chip, and I could put all of the software on top of this machine called an emulator,

and test all of the software on this pretend chip, and I could fix it all before I send it to the fab.

And if I could do that, when I send it to the fab, it should work.

Nobody knows, but it should work.

And so we came to the conclusion...

Let's take half of the money we had left in the bank.

At the time, it was about a million dollars.

Take half of that money and go buy this machine.

So instead of keeping the money to stay alive, I took half of the money to go buy this machine.

Well, I called this guy up.

The company's called IQOS.