Ambiq CEO Scott Hanson explains why the low-power chip company sticks with standard foundry transistors: it protects yield and access to capacity. The aside is about AI data centers crowding out every other chip customer.
…the transistors themselves, they must be the general purpose transistors that TSMC offers to the rest of the world. This was important from the start, right? If I had the ability to tweak the transistor structure, that would absolutely help us, right? There are benefits that we gain there. But
yeah, then you lose yields and everything else too. Like all the stuff, all of that scale that you're getting, then you lose all that, right?
You lose all that, yeah. And yeah, especially today, look at how everybody's fighting for that last wafer of capacity, right? As the as the data centers are soaking up all available capacity, everybody else is left kind of fighting for what's left. And if you're in it, you're in this
rest of us. Yeah, yeah,
exactly. And if you're in this narrow technology node that nobody else is using, there's just not that much available. So that was another good decision that we made is let's stay with general purpose transistors. And so then it's about, well, let's make sure that the models are as good as they can…
Can we do a little bit of magic? I read kid books with my kids all the time now. Can we do a little bit of magic school bus and shrink us down and go down to the transistor level? And so like, okay, so now we're only going to be switching like sub-threshold, sorry, sub-threshold, you know, really…