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“Substrate” has been in the news for, allegedly, coming up with a way to make computer chips for much cheaper and at much higher quality than anyone else in the industry.
There’s just one problem: all signs indicate that the entire business is fake.
- The founder is known con-artist involved in such other things as solving nuclear fusion and stealing $2.5M in a Kickstarter scam.
- The cofounder is the founder’s brother and has literally zero documented professional or academic experience.
- The company’s job postings are nonsensical and AI-generated
- The company is unwilling to evidence any of its (extremely extraordinary) claims, which have been made on a timescale that makes no sense in the context of the semiconductor industry
- The company’s research facility is, based on photographs that they’ve published, at least two orders of magnitude smaller than what would be necessary.
Ebeam lithography and multi-beam has been in existence for years (maybe decades) but they are used to make masks not chips.
If the requirement is to make one chip per week per machine, yeah, certainly possible (may even improves to 2 chips a week, lol). But you better be prepared to build fabs the size of superdome or bigger.
Or unless he might have figured out how to flatten a chip design to just one single layer, without the need of muiltiple layers needing mask and exposure.
It's hard to tell -- there is entanglement though of some kind, per Semianalysis:
" Note we have worked with Substrate since as far back as 2022, but the technical analysis here was by team members who did not have access to that NDA information."
Substrate X-Ray Lithography, a New American Foundry, $10k Logic Wafers
newsletter.semianalysis.com
... Further down, this article does point out challenges:
Naysayers will point out a million reasons why this is improbable, difficult, etc. - and they are mostly correct. There is a big difference between lab-scale and industrialized, high-volume tools. Substrate itself realizes this and agrees they are in for a lot of development and scaling pain.
... and their summary doesn't read like they're part of this:
Most of this report is based on the promise of Substrate. A novel demo tool with these imaging capabilities built in 2 years is impressive. But there is a lot more to prove before they disrupt the chipmaking industry. We're hopeful for success but skeptical given how many questions there are. We’re looking forward to a few milestones that will silence the skeptics (both internal and external):
It's hard to tell -- there is entanglement though of some kind, per Semianalysis:
" Note we have worked with Substrate since as far back as 2022, but the technical analysis here was by team members who did not have access to that NDA information."
SemiAnalysis is an LLC registered to Dylan Patel, who also does not have academic or professional semiconductor experience so what exactly was Substrate paying him for as far back as 2022?
This is pretty strong language from FCR. Someone may have an axe to grind here:
- The founder is known con-artist involved in such other things as solving nuclear fusion and stealing $2.5M in a Kickstarter scam.
- The cofounder is the founder’s brother and has literally zero documented professional or academic experience.
Here is what I found on FCR which, in my opinion, is sketchy to say the least:
Fox Chapel Research (FCR) appears to be an independent, anonymously-run research newsletter published on Substack, focusing on deep-dive investigations into semiconductor- and technology-industry companies.
I have no idea what Folsom St Labs is or does but it is seemingly related to both James Proud and his brother, the founders of Substrate. Apparently they were inventing biotechnology and nanotechnology while solving nuclear fusion and inventing a better-than-ASML-scanner lithography method.
This really does read like a made for Netflix series.
Lol agreed Substrate sounds sketchy. It's just not clear yet what Dylan's level of involvement is; though it is leaning he may have been used to ... Help fleece, er, get investors.
(Disclosure - I have a negative opinion of Dylan, but am trying to stay unbiased here in my wording though.)
Lol agreed Substrate sounds sketchy. It's just not clear yet what Dylan's level of involvement is; though it is leaning he may have been used to ... Help fleece, er, get investors.
(Disclosure - I have a negative opinion of Dylan, but am trying to stay unbiased here in my wording though.)
it is important to note that Substrate has no intention of selling them to third parties such as Intel or TSMC. Instead, Substrate plans to build its own fabs in the U.S.
Dylan may have a good team now but he was alone for the first few years and he was selling snake oil (my opinion). We worked with him a bit in 2021/2022 but his lack of experience showed through so we did not continue. The straw that broke the camels back per say was when he called TSMC a drug dealer. He apologized but there was no going back after that.
SemiAnalysis: "TSMC, The Drug Dealer, Is Trying To Make An Addicted Junkie Out Of Intel – Wafer Supply Agreement Insights For AMD, Apple, Broadcom, Intel, MediaTek, Nvidia, and Qualcomm"
substack.com
