GoKawiilI live in Almaty Kazakhstan. It’s not known as a hotbed of semiconductors (yet). When I first met Nursultan Kabylkas, and learned his background, I had to hear his story.
This is the story of how one professor led a team of students to design the first chip in Kazakhstan's history, and in doing so, may have birthed a whole new national industry.
TL:DR:
The Win: Kazakhstan’s first student-designed RISC-V chip.
The Strategy: Skipping the “fab-first” trap by specializing in verification via Texer.AI and Reasonbase.io
The Takeaway: Strategy + intellectual capital > Physical capital. You don’t need a fab to own a piece of the global supply chain.
Kazakhstan’s First Chip
Nursultan’s journey began at AMD in the United States, where he worked on silicon verification. When he returned to Kazakhstan in 2023 to teach engineering, he found a desert; the local semiconductor landscape was limited mostly to FPGA programming and encryption devices. When he shared his dream of bringing "real" silicon design to the country, he was met with skepticism. In his own words, he was laughed at. Most people jumped straight to the "billion-dollar fab" problem, assuming that without a massive manufacturing plant, the industry couldn't exist.
Nursultan kept looking for an inspiring project to give his students a hands on project, a project that would move the needle through talent rather than infrastructure. Realizing that the key to developing an ecosystem here needed to start with talent, Nursultan focused in on design and verification. He found his catalyst in the “One Student, one Chip Initiative” from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The program gave him a framework to get started, and after recruiting some enthusiastic students at Nazarbayev University they began designing the first chips.
Through a partnership with a Chinese fab, the team got space on Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) and received back their RISC-V general purpose processor. The project went viral, the media caught on, and the project gained national attention.
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