Why the Death of Moore's Law Makes Open Source Silicon Possible | NVIDIA, China, Trust

My exclusive interview with Bunnie:
   • Hardware Hacking, Biotech, China vs US Man...  

Bunnie's IRIS technology:
https://bunnie.org/iris/

Legendary Hardware Hacker Bunnie Huang went to MIT, hacked the first Xbox, worked on an iPhone data privacy project with Edward Snowden, and launched two open source hardware platforms (Novena and Precursor).

I got to film Bunnie’s thrilling new talk at CrowdSupply's Teardown 2025 on the death of Moore’s Law and how the proliferation of 28 nanometer fabs in China opens new opportunities for Open Source Silicon chips that can be cost-value competitive and erode the moats of big players like NVIDIA. Bunnie also showcases IRIS, his stunning new IR technology that images in-situ mounted chips as if they were transparent!

Chapters:
00:00 Preview
00:27 Intro
00:39 Talk start - Vision for Trustable Silicon
02:28 Bunnie's first job out of college - Making Silicon, three tapeouts
02:52 Why Bunnie got out of silicon
03:18 Pacing - Moore's Law is faster than you, gatekeeping as a strategy
04:50 Chip fabs are expensive - depreciation, our broken accounting standards
07:30 Flagship expense - ASML Extreme Ultraviolet Stepper
09:08 Chip Jargon Review
10:46 Masks are expensive, $1M - $50M,
11:39 E-Beam Writers are expensive, $50M~$150M per machine, industry is super opaque
13:13 IP costs, NVIDIA's CUDA moat
14:30 Everything has changed. Here's why. Moore's Law is Dead
15:09 The same area of silicon costs more after 28 nanometers
16:44 What's special about 28nm?
18:15 Coming Changes - Pace, China's massive fab build out, fabs as a public utility
21:10 Open Source Silicon, continuous integration, the IP Question
22:28 Masks have a 10 year copyright, legally reverse engineering PDK process design kits
25:01 Now is the Time to Return to Chips
27:10 How do we Inspect Chips? Design for Inspectability
29:16 Silicon is Transparent to Infrared Light, Commodity CMOS Sensors
30:43 IRIS - open source method for IR imaging inspection
33:58 Fully automated IRIS imaging
36:53 Baochip - Bunnie piggybacking on TSMC 22nm Planar tape out, Partially-Open Chip
38:58 Open-Source RTL, Quad-Core I/O Processor computer architecture
43:02 Eye Candy - insider look at Baochip
47:40 Cool Chip, What is it For? Silicon you can check
49:00 Summary - The Vision for Trustable Silicon, how we can help

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I'll be a speaker at Product Development Expo (PDX), October 21-22, 2025!
$50 Off your ticket with my discount code: LEM50
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