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During those early months of research I came upon a sub-discipline of physics, called Quantum Physics, through reading a book (The Principles of Quantum Mechanics – 1930, 1947) published by Paul Dirac. It was during this detailed study that I was introduced to the mind-expanding concepts of particles and waves, collapsing wave functions, and the... See more

Navigating this search space requires intuition . You need someone who can look at the desired field pattern and just... sense what shape might produce it.

The people who can do this have spent decades building up a feel for how electrons move through structures, how fields bend around corners, how waves interfere. They can sketch a spiral on a... See more

So, if you’re NVIDIA and selling high frequency chips in boxes, you can sell a single product. You can design one GPU and sell it to everyone. There is no difference between the Navy putting your chip on a ship, or Sony putting it in a Playstation. They can all just buy the chip and plug it in. But, for example, if you’re buying components for a... See more

ARM can design a chip that works in any phone because digital chips are self-contained. But an analog phased array tile designed for a Starlink terminal won’t work in a different satellite. The interference patterns will be completely different!

Think back to the TV antenna, a bent wire specifically shaped to receive certain frequencies. Imagine you could print that shape onto a silicon chip, layer by layer, laying down copper traces in specific geometries, creating structures that interact with EM waves in precise ways.

On one layer, you might have a spiral. On the next, a grid. On the... See more

That signal carried information, like encoded images of I Love Lucy , compressed into patterns of electromagnetic oscillation, broadcasted through the air, absorbed by your antenna, decoded by your TV. If you step back and think about it, this entire chain is completely absurd. We transmit moving pictures through the air using invisible waves. And... See more

This is fundamentally how an antenna works. The old bent TV antenna on your grandparent’s roof was shaped specifically to receive UHF frequencies broadcast from a distant TV station. The EM waves traveling through the atmosphere would hit the antenna, excite the electrons in the metal, and those oscillating electrons would travel down the wire into... See more

Remember the prism? That’s what analog silicon does, but for all electromagnetic frequencies, not just visible light. Instead of glass bending light, you can use carefully shaped conductors printed on silicon to bend, direct, and shape EM waves.

Digital silicon is about switching: transistor on or off, conducting or not, one or zero. All the gates, all the logic, all of computation follows from that binary foundation. It’s powerful, but it’s also, as we’ve discussed, the simplest possible thing you can do with an electron. It’s caveman math.

Analog silicon is about shaping . Instead of just... See more