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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

I'm just as confused as you are, honestly. It feels like we've seen the "ASIC for everything" campaign so many times over, and yet only FPGAs and CUDA typically find adoption in the industry.

A lot of my questions went away when I got to this line though:

> He’s also fully engaged in the third leg of the “democratizing chip design” stool: education.

This is a valiant effort. Chip design is a hard world to break into, and many applications that could benefit from ASICs aren't iterating or testing on it because it sucks to do. It's a lot of work to bring that skill ceiling down, but as a programmer I could see how an LLVM-style intermediate representation layer could help designers get up-and-running faster.

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Isn't HDL basically the intermediate representation you want? Plus, you can learn it with simulation or FPGA dev board which makes it reasonably accessable

All I remember from my experience with VHDL/Verilog is that they really truly suck.

> I'm just as confused as you are, honestly. It feels like we've seen the "ASIC for everything" campaign so many times over, and yet only FPGAs and CUDA typically find adoption in the industry.

That's because we don't need more digital. Digital transistors are effectively free (to a first approximation).

The axes that we need more of involve analog and RF. Less power consumption, better RF speed/range, higher speed PCI, etc. all require messy analog and RF design. And those are the expensive tools. Those are also the complex tools require genuine knowledge.

Now, if your AI could deliver analog and RF, you'd make a gazillion dollars. The fact that everybody knows this and still haven't pulled it off should tell you something.

Would you really earn more money doing this than monopolizing online search advertising? Because I find that hard to believe. Hardware seems like a miserable business.

That might change if geopolitical tensions fragment the global supply chains.

Being a fab is a garbage business.

Being a software supplier to fabless semiconductor companies is a very profitable business.

In the Gold Rush, the people who came out rich were selling the shovels and denim.

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