Rao: True hardware innovation requires exploiting non-linear silicon physics
Naveen Rao · Inside the $4.5B Startup Building Brain-Inspired Chips for AI · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Feb 7, 2026 · at 29:54
Naveen Rao, CEO and co-founder of Unconventional AI, explains the core thesis behind designing brain-inspired analog chips at Playground Global.
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“What's really interesting is if something is linear and predictable, it actually is very easy to simulate. If you can simulate in a digital system, it's less interesting. It turns out, like, silicon has all these beautiful physics that are associated with it. We just try to, like, minimize. We say, like, where can I make it look as linear as possible? That's the least interesting part of it, and that's the part that everyone's been trained to go after. So now we're saying, okay, open it. Open the aperture. Look at the places where it's ugly. Quote, unquote, right? And non-linear. That's where the interesting things happen. And incidentally, those things are extremely hard to simulate on a digital machine. When it's hard to simulate a digital machine, it's doing something interesting.”
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