Silicon Adventures - Go Ahead; Be Bold! [technical and business adventures in founding Myricom]

Summary form only given. In addition to a few reminiscences, I shall describe in this invited talk some of the technical and business adventures that a small group of VLSI researchers from Caltech and USC/ISI has had over the past five years in founding Myricom. Our company is in the commodity interconnect business, and our competitive position depends largely on the chips we design. In way of background, our initial, technical base in multicomputers and routing chips is described in the first and last papers in the Proceedings of the 1992 conference in this ARVLSI series. Except for the design effort, which rarely exceeds ten person-months per chip, Myricom's custom and semi-custom VLSI chips can easily be associated with all of the question-mark phrases above, along with a few other radical ideas. Our success in this demanding market has required a great deal of attention to and investment in the production and on-time delivery of our products, but has also benefited from our engineering passions for reliability, operating margins, and low-power operation. Of course, we out-source most of our manufacturing - wafer fabrication, packaging, and circuit-board assembly, but we retain material-control, production-testing, and qualitycontrol functions in our internal production department. Although Myricom is a somewhat unconventional company, it has been highly successful by conventional, financial measures.