A Silicon Valley chipmaker set out to license a transistor. The harder lesson was that the useful product was the whole radio-frequency chip - and the heat it could spare a crowded Wi-Fi box.
For two decades, Chelsio has sold a stubbornly practical idea: the network card should do more of the networking. Its seventh-generation platform now carries that bet into 400Gb Ethernet, GPU clusters and a market crowded with much larger chip companies.
The Dublin semiconductor startup paused its solid-state circuit-breaker push to chase a nastier bottleneck: moving enormous current into AI processors without wasting it across the motherboard.