The Fabless Silicon Valley.
On a sunny November Friday afternoon, Jing Wu decided to kill his boss and coworkers at a chip design startup. I can’t pretend to know exactly why this guy offed some other guys but given that I, too, have worked in a four years old and funded fabless semiconductor design startup maybe our experiences are in parallel.
In Silicon Valley there are literally thousands upon thousands of these fabless shops. Companies, usually led by an engineer scion from a bigger firm or academic background, that begs for cash from ventures and angels with a pitch to develop either a cheaper copy of an existing integrated circuit design or an amalgamation of multiple designs onto systems-on-a-chip (SoC). The one I worked at had the pipe dream of trying to integrate WiFi and WiMax standards onto a dual-die SoC while SiPort is trying to develop a MP3 and media radio transmission chip for mobile platforms. The shops are called “fabless” because they don’t actually own a fab—a fabrication foundry to physically produce chips—but rather either sell the designs to a bigger corporation, such as Freescale, or to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in Asia who makes all the electronic gadgets that you so love.
Startup CEOs with a chip on their shoulder or too big of an ego might even try package up their designs and hire a foundry, such as Taipei-baed TSMC, to make the chips for sale. The risk for this is crazy, especially considering the extensive time and staff the sales process requires. Although, if your business revenue were mostly derived from just one company, such as PortalPlayer’s relationship with Apple, then by all means you’re going to be flush with cash, or at least until Apple decides it’s more prudent to design everything in-house.
Even then, with faster development, no need for chip production investment, and potentially lucrative market of OEM electronics in a global market the risks are pretty good in comparison to the upside and these shops run all across Silicon Valley. It is why we’re called Silicon Valley. If your company flops there’s bound to another one down the street that’s hiring.
Make no mistake though, when people describe startups before the go-go days of Dot-com’s in the late 80’s and 90’s these chip companies were the ones that they were talking about. It was a common routine for engineers to sleep under their desks or pull 90-hour work weeks. You eat, sleep, and die by your contribution to your startup. That then lies the problem: everyone wants in on this game. If you just listen carefully at every ethnic Asian restaurant, someone is talking loudly about their work in these companies. Perhaps even complaining to their counterparts in a off-branch in New Dheli or Taipei about missing deadlines, code bugs, or just how tired they are.
This crazy competition to produce the designs as fast possible in order to garner sales puts an incredible amount of stress. To who? To a nonexistent labor pool. You see, the problem ends up being that there’s just simply not enough local labor to go around. The talented electronic engineering or computer science kids educated in the United States gets snapped up by big names such as Intel well before they even graduate. The second and third tier engineers lack the experience, you need people with master degrees sprinkled with PhDs, to actually research and develop an entire chip by themselves. So what can one do? Import.
But without big money the quality of labor you bring in from China or India are still not the best. Often times they’re the second-string engineers unable to pick up jobs in the hottest market in the world. But they’re cheap and once they’re flown to the US many are placed into tiny studios in Fremont or Milpitas rented by the startup. And since the company has sponsored them, their ability to stay in the USA is completely in your hands.
That then brings me to this point: why would this particular person decide to kill his coworkers? Kill his boss?
Those with the circumstance to be able to pick up another job will just move on. For them, the lull in between is meaningless but those that can’t just suffer through the insane production schedules. Maybe those people will snap. People in their late forties who have immigrated to this country in hopes of making it big might just to be too burdened with stress. And every instance in where they were slighted will quickly turn into a means of justification. The anger you have in thinking you got screwed over will manifest deep in your hearts. And it’s sad.
