Semi Doped Pub Quiz

Aug 02, 2026

If you’ve been on our channels lately, you’d be able to crack this one:

In 2017, three colleagues at a Dallas-headquartered chip house quit together and set up shop in one of their garages. Their bet was almost insultingly plain as it was cool: as accelerators got faster, the hard problem would stop being computation and start being transportation. At current rates, a signal leaving a processor is close to unrecognizable after a meter and a half of copper, with the whole loss budget of a rack backplane spent on the trip. So somebody has to sit in the middle of the wire, read the wreckage, and write it back out clean.

That is more or less the entire company which is worth $80B today. It’s products move bits from the GPU to the CPU, SSD storage, or the network interface. It’s rapid rise to profitability stems from the need to move bits really well between these devices.

Name it.

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Its four silicon families are named Aries, Taurus, Leo and Scorpio, all signs of the zodiac. The software stack that unifies them is called COSMOS.

The flagship product category is the smart retimer. The founders had run the high-speed interface and clocking business at their previous employer, so they were rebuilding the thing they already knew, for a customer set that did not yet exist.