How to survive until making substantial fund

Fabless semiconductor company, a high tech startup having lots of potential that guaranteed from high level talents and high quality patents over the world. I heard that most semiconductor company takes more time than companies in other industry, like at least 6-9years to produce the chip design and finally make some money to operate normally. As most of employees are all engineers minimum operation cost from the benefit and payroll is tremendously high. As a startup, and as a company in semiconductor industry, how do you survive for such a long time before making substantial regular income? (Except venture capital) High burn rate makes so hard. High in payroll, benefit, patent maintenance, and rent fee from the equipments make thing so hard to survive every year.