Rob Wachen
speaker
529 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 30 Jun
Rob Wachen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
What was it like for you?
I'm super curious.
Funny, I mean a lot of the traditional semiconductor funds missed the entire AI chip, like all the AI chip companies.
And like all the coding experts missed all the coding companies.
I think it's very hard to realize the constraints have changed and when you've looked at tape outs for 20 years and you've seen so many of them not work on the first try or the second try or the third try, like you couldn't even run a workload.
You totally forget that EDA tools are way better and that FPGAs exist today in a way that they didn't exist before.
And all the types of validation you can do today just wasn't possible for us.
A lot of our believers, either they were kind of on two sides of it.
They were just believers in the market and the team, or they were building chips today and extremely technical, like the high 50 trading firms, where they would literally audit everything from the micro architecture and the RTL to like the board designs and like the schedule and the software stack.
And we would sit down with like 10 of their people who build their own chips.
And they're asking us such detailed questions that we're wondering, are they going to build the chip?
It was really on either of those sides.
And if you were anywhere in the middle, you just wouldn't understand it.
Another one.
Yeah, there's definitely a find-a-way mentality.
If you're here, you're here because you assume it's possible.
So we can't be saying it's impossible.
Everything is solvable, and we're just going to work at it until we figure it out.
A favorite story I have, this guy who's kind of a legend in Silicon Validation who joined our team, and we were doing the early stages of what's called wafer sort.
when your chips are coming out of fab, they go out on these wafers and you have this thing called a probe card that attaches to the wafer before you dice it with these probe pads and you send these electrical signals to basically test which chips are good and bad so when I slice the wafer into a bunch of chips, I can package it and only package the good ones.
Showing 421–440 of 529 · page 22 of 27
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