Lucite

Started: 2026-02-19 19:53:45

Submitted: 2026-02-19 20:44:57

Visibility: World-readable

A monument in plastic

Earlier this month I got a parting gift from the startup where I've worked for the past three-and-a-half years: a real die from the chip we built, mounted inside a square of clear plastic along with a floorplan showing what each of the pieces of the chip are.

Rivos GA0 die

Holding the slab of plastic in person, I can turn the die so it catches the light and exposes the physical design of the circuitry in the chip. I did most of my work in the CPU cores in the middle of the top of the die. Most of the footprint is consumed by a grid of GPU-like processing elements, which of course ended up being used for LLM workloads because generative AI is consuming all of the oxygen in the tech sector.

When I left my stable big-tech job in the summer of 2022 to join a chip startup, it felt like I was jumping off a cliff hoping to fly. At the time Rivos had the architecture docs describing what to build, and a big-picture outline of the firmware stack necessary to bring the chip up out of reset and securely boot to Linux. I filled in some of the big empty spaces in the firmware stack, writing machine-mode firmware for the RISC-V applications cores to manage the boot process and remain resident to provide runtime services to the Linux kernel. It was the biggest, and most rewarding, software project I've ever created — and I wrote it from scratch, in bare-metal Rust.

In our moment of triumph, after successfully bringing up our chip in our lab last summer, we were acquired by a tech giant only interested in our AI accelerator core. (I guess everyone's an AI company now.) They don't seem to care about the chip we built or the people who made it happen. We're not going to build a follow-up chip building on the lessons we learned here, and we're not going to sell the RISC-V CPU cores we built into a data center near you. I will cherish this chunk of plastic and silicon as my most tangible monument to the rise and fall of the best job I ever had.