🎥 Moore’s Law isn't dying—it’s changing.

In this episode of SOSV Deep Tech Live, we sit down with semiconductor legend Dr. Rick Gottscho, Retired Head of Products and CTO of Lam Research, to unpack the past, present, and highly disruptive future of chip manufacturing.

Without plasma, Moore's Law would have stalled decades sooner. It remains the foundational technology enabling the etching, deposition, and cleaning of transistors at the atomic scale. Now, as silicon hits its physical limits and AI pushes compute demand to historic highs, plasma is becoming more critical than ever.

Rick spent 40+ years at the center of how chips actually get made. If you're building in semiconductors, advanced hardware, or physical AI, this conversation changes how you think about the stack beneath the stack.

What we cover:

• The $400B Corporate Turnaround: How Lam Research went from one quarter away from bankruptcy in 1998 to a global powerhouse by embedding core values like radical open communication throughout the entire organization.

• Skating to the Inflections: The new playbook for predicting massive industry shifts—including how Lam anticipated 3D NAND and dry resist lithography to capture dominant market share.

• Why Pure AI Fails in Hardware: Why a Tesla-style ”big data” approach doesn't work when a single physical data point takes a day and costs thousands of dollars—and how Lam pioneered a ”Hybrid Physical AI” model.

• America’s True Bottleneck: Why the US doesn't have an innovation problem, but a manufacturing problem—and why regaining system-level ecosystem control matters more than just owning the most advanced chip.

• The HAX Plasma Forge: A look at SOSV’s newest collaboration with the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL) to help deep tech startups bridge the gap between PowerPoint theories and physical, scaled hardware.

Are you a founder building in semiconductors, advanced materials, or industrial processing?

Learn more and apply to the HAX Plasma Forge today: https://hax.co/

📍 Broadcast live from the SOSV NY event space in Manhattan, SOSV Deep Tech LIVE is our monthly video podcast series exploring the frontiers of deep tech with leading founders, researchers, and technologists.