[reflexe]

In my experience in two HW companies that developed their own ASICs (one as a startup and one as a publicity traded company), we never developed any chip fully by ourself. In all of the cases there was another large company who helped to make the project work so we will actually end up with wafers.

If you are not at the scale of NVIDIA/intel and release a new silicon every other month, it is not worth it to recruit so many people for a relatively short period. However, I am not fully sure how involved they were in the pre-silicon verification process, but at least in some cases they were very involved in the development.

[bgnn]

That's not correct. I've worked from start-ups to semiconductor giants. Always the first option to develop everything in house, if you can find the talent. This is pretty much industry standard.

[ancharm]

What ASIC/semi start up that you know of is developing everything in house? That is absurdly complex and hundreds of millions of dollars...

[bgnn]

Pretty much most of them. They might buy a small IP or two here and there, but for the rest everyone develops their design mostly in house. It's not 100s of millions, that's a ridiculous amount of money unless you are designing like a huge CPU or TPU or so. We design (can't give company name) quite large chips with complex analog and digital in 7nm and 5nm as a start-up and our seed funding was less than 20 million. This is kind of bare minimum funding for a semi start-up anyhow.