First Silicon

It's January 1993. You and nine other engineers just quit good jobs, pooled $3.8M, and founded a chip company with no product, no customers, and no factory. That last part is the business model. Welcome to fabless semiconductors.

FIRST SILICON is a business sim about running a silicon startup through the industry's wildest fifteen years, 1993–2008 — from a garage, through venture rounds, to an IPO and the quarterly earnings treadmill that follows. You don't need to know what a netlist is. The game will teach you, and the history really happened.

Your first chip locks your path. Digital or analog — the fork decides your markets, your rivals, and what kind of company you become.

Ship real silicon. Feasibility, design, tape-in, layout, tape-out. Freeze the netlist at 71% verification coverage and pray, or burn three more months while the market window closes. First silicon either works, works with errata — or you pay for a respin.

Raise money with your eyes open. Real term sheets on a real cap table. Every round dilutes you; every board seat is someone who can vote you out. Confidence is survival.

Then take on The Street. File the S-1, survive the roadshow, price the IPO on a night the window is open. After that: guide earnings every quarter — sandbag or stretch. Beats compound. Misses spiral. The board remembers.

History runs on rails around you. Consumer 3D graphics lands in 1996 and resets every roadmap. The internet boom giveth; 2001 taketh away. Footnotes along the way tell you what really happened.

Plus: license ARM-class cores or roll your own · qualify process nodes from 0.8µm down · manage a distribution channel with price protection, return rights, and the ever-loaded gun of stuffed inventory · 14 markets, each with rivals who do not sleep.

Plays in your browser, desktop or phone. Ends the turn on Enter. Autosaves every month; three save slots plus JSON export.

Take the risk. Found the company.