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Contractor =
  • A third party who work under Etched’s day-to-day direction and report to Etched managers
  • Engagement structure: Master MSA between Etched and vendor + per-project SOWs that name contracted engineers + rates (contractors usually have a specific scope and are paid on some time basis)
  • Finite contract length unlike full-time employees
  • Contracts negotiated and owned by ASIC ops, with legal sign-off happening through legal team / legal counsel
Rates and legal terms are often different abroad (e.g. India) VS. in the US. Rates abroad are often cheaper than those quoted for the US.This is something to keep in mind when negotiating, as many contractors have separate legal entities under the same name in multiple locations globally.

VTool Contractor Card

  • Currently our largest DV contractor
  • Working on IO die DV (Ethernet, Datalink, D2D NoC, PCIe, FSU, PLL, NLU)
  • Headquartered in Tel Aviv with engineers distributed across Eastern Europe
  • Mixed: Engineers are productive but communication / iteration is challenging due to time zone differences
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  • Grace Qi: Etched-side POC
n/a
Backend partner =
  • Whole companies we hire to do part of the design of the chip (physical design, DFT insertion, packaging, etc.)
  • Usually a whole team of engineers are assigned to the project. They report to the managers at the backend partner company, not directly to Etched managers
  • Engineers at these companies impact our chip’s actual design. Contrast this with EDA or IP where the company sells us blocks/tooling that our internal engineers use

Alphwave Vendor Card

  • The partner that took Sohu (our first chip) from RTL through tape-out, and supplies the high-speed PHYs we are still using
  • Areas of focus include synthesis, P&R (place & route), STA (static timing analysis)
  • Ongoing Sohu post-silicon support
  • Mixed bag but mostly ok relationship
  • High need for follow-ups and ineffective direct-to-engineers communication
    • At one point, executive team + ops + selected engineers travelled onsite to Bangalore to own Sohu closeout
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  • Ankur Shah (Head of SoC RTL), Gavin Uberti (CEO), John Wang (Eng Ops Lead), and many others have owned Sohu close-out from Bangalore
  • As mentioned above, primarily a Sohu A0/B0 partner. Not super relevant for Chronos development
  • Company now operates under Qualcomm umbrella, which is why you may see emails from qti.qualcomm.com email addresses. Alphawave Semi naming is still used internally however
Last modified on July 28, 2026