- mehrmals pro WocheErscheinungsrhythmus
- 49 mintypische Länge
- vor 4 Tagenletzte Folge
The business and technology of semiconductors. Alpha for engineers and investors alike.
Folgen
Why Marvell Wants Lumentum: Vertical Integration in AI Optics With Cignal AI
Marvell's potential acquisition of Lumentum is a strategic vertical integration play to capture the massive value optical components now unlock in the AI era. Andrew Schmitt and Scott Wilkinson of market research firm Signal AI join Austin
How Intel Took EMIB From Science Fiction to High Volume: Intel Foundry's Ravi Mahajan
Intel's EMIB technology represents a scalable, cost-effective advanced packaging solution that now serves as a core strategic differentiator for its foundry services. Ravi Mahajan, a distinguished engineer at Intel Foundry, joins Austin to
RF Over Plastic Is a Third Option Between Copper and Optics: Point2's Sean Park
A novel third option is emerging for data center interconnects between short-reach copper and power-hungry optics. Point2 CEO Sean Park joins Vik Sekar to explain his company's Active RF Cable (ARC) technology, which sends high-frequency ra
MicroVCSELs vs MicroLEDs, a MicroExplainer
Austin Lyons and Vik Sekar host a micro-explainer on the two competing micro-emitter technologies for AI interconnects: microLEDs and microVCSELs. They break down Credo's surprising pivot at OCP from its microLED acquisition to a microVCSEL
AI Inference Is a Data Movement Problem: Microsoft's Saurabh Dighe on Maia 300
Microsoft's Maia 300 is a fully co-designed system, optimized to solve the memory-bound "data movement problem" of emerging agentic AI workloads. Saurabh Dighe, Corporate VP of Azure Hardware Systems at Microsoft, sits down with Austin to d
Synopsys’s Amazon Deal and GPT-Synopsys: Ravi Subramanian
The demand for workload-specific hardware is forcing a strategic shift in the semiconductor IP business. Synopsys's Ravi Subramanian joins Austin to discuss why the company is moving to a new royalty-based model for its custom "application
Every Muse User Gets 2 CPUs and 8GB in Meta's Cloud. Your Phone Already Has That
The push to run AI agents on edge devices will not be driven by model labs or hardware vendors, but by service providers like Meta whose ad-based business models create a powerful financial incentive to offload massive cloud compute costs o
Flash Hit Its Physical Limit. ReRAM Is the Replacement: WeeBit Nano's Ilan Sever
As embedded flash hits a physical and economic scaling wall below 22nm, a new on-chip memory is needed. Ilan Sever of WeeBit Nano joins to explain how Resistive RAM (ReRAM) is positioned to become the new standard by offering a low-cost, hi
Qualcomm's Durga Malladi: HBC vs HBM, Dragonfly AI 250, and Winning on TCO
Qualcomm re-entered the data center inference market late — competitive GPUs, XPUs, and custom accelerators are already out there. Durga Malladi (EVP/GM, Technology Planning, Edge & Data Center) explains why they didn't build another me-too
Pacing AI Means More Compute, Not Less
The debate over "pacing" AI for safety is a red herring, as the practical outcome of more safety work is not a slowdown but a net increase in demand for compute hardware. Austin Lyons and Vik Sekar unpack Dario Amodei's call to slow down fr
TSMC Will Buy High NA After All: ASML's New 6x12-Inch Mask
The emergence of user-friendly AI agents is creating massive new hardware demand, which in turn is forcing the semiconductor industry into a complex, multi-year transition to High NA EUV lithography and an entirely new 12-inch photomask sta
OpenAI’s Jalapeño! Feeling Hot Hot Hot!
Austin and Vik react to OpenAI's Jalapeño announcement at Hot Chips. Plus extra spicy questions like should OpenAI sell it, how much of this was AI-written RTL, and where is Anthropic's chip? Key Takeaways: - The chip's core design philosop
Grok Bots and How CPUs are used in Agentic AI
The rise of user-friendly agentic AI platforms will create a massive new demand category for dedicated, high-core-count "agentic CPUs" to execute tasks in parallel, fundamentally reshaping the server CPU market beyond just feeding GPUs. Key
Tensordyne's R K Anand: HPE Juniper Fabric, Logarithmic Math, MoE Inference, Air Cooling, 3nm
Tensordyne co-founder and CPO R K Anand joins Austin to discuss the company's strategy for disrupting AI inference. RK explains how Tensordyne combines power-efficient logarithmic math with a battle-hardened networking fabric from partner H
NEWS TAKE: China's Optical Ban, Volta's $10B Anthropic Deal, AMD's Earnings
Austin Lyons and Vik Sekar break down three stories that hit semis last week. They analyze a proposed US ban on Chinese optical transceivers that threatens to cut off 50% of the global supply, the market's reaction to AMD's surprise $800M C
GlobalFoundries Thomas Barber: CPO, Silicon Photonics, 300mm, SiGe, OCI, NRZ
The physical limits of copper are forcing a shift to optical interconnects in AI data centers. Austin sits down with GlobalFoundries' Thomas Barber to unpack why GF thinks it can lead that transition twice over: once with its long-running s
How Retimers Built an $80B Company: The Story of Astera Labs
A retimer is a small, unglamorous chip. Astera turned it into a high-margin franchise. Austin and Vik cover why copper gives up at PCIe speeds, what a retimer does that a redriver can't, and how one H100 socket became a moat. Then Scorpio:
News Take: Hyperscaler CDS, SK Hynix Earnings, China's DUV
Austin Lyons and Vik Sekar break down the market's recent volatility. They discuss the rising fear around hyperscaler debt, visible in credit default swap (CDS) premiums, and the counter-argument that GPU ROI is actually understated. They t
Datacenter Interconnects: Copper vs. Optics, Nvidia's 78-Layer PCB, Co-Packaged Optics (CPO)
Vik Sekar and Austin Lyons tackle the biggest bottleneck in inference: moving data. They break down the three tiers of datacenter networking — scale up, scale out, scale across — and the core engineering trade-off at each layer: copper vs.
PicoJool's Al Yuen: The Case for GaAs VCSELs in Scale-Up Interconnects
Al Yuen, CEO of PicoJool, talks with Austin about using VCSELs for scale-up optical interconnects in AI data centers. Al explains why gallium arsenide (GaAs) supply is unconstrained while indium phosphide (InP) is limited, and how PicoJool
WEKA's Val Bercovici: KV Cache, DeepSeek V4, HBF, SLC vs QLC NAND, CXL, NVLink, Tokenomics
Vik welcomes Val Bercovici from Weka to discuss the rapidly evolving landscape of AI memory and storage. Val explains how Weka's architecture leverages high-bandwidth networks to make storage faster than motherboard DRAM. They dive into KV
Micron's Record Profits, Apple's CXMT Plea: AI is Eating All the Memory
Austin and Vik break down the current memory crisis, where AI demand is driving unprecedented profits for memory makers like Micron, while simultaneously causing inflation and price hikes for consumer electronics. They discuss how even prem
Qualcomm's HBC Memory, Alphawave, Modular, and more
Qualcomm flew Austin to New York for its investor day, where the communications company laid out a plan to make data center, automotive, and IoT two-thirds of its business by FY29. Austin was in the room and asked Cristiano Amon a question
Advanced Packaging, TSMC CoWoS, Intel EMIB
New episode: Advanced packaging for AI chips, from wire bonds to TSMC CoWOS and Intel EMIB. Packaging is no longer an afterthought. It is the chip, and Intel's EMIB challenges TSMC's CoWOS. • Three CoWOS flavors: silicon, organic RDL, local
Computex Mania 2026: Optics and Power
Austin and Vik discuss their recent experience at Computex, where they met for the first time in person after six months of podcasting together. They share insights about the massive show, the people they connected with, and the exciting de
Huawei's Tau Scaling Law: Is the "EUV Killer" Real?
Huawei dropped a paper claiming 1.4nm-class performance without EUV, and the internet immediately declared ASML dead and US export controls useless. Austin and Vik recorded one day after Memorial Day to unpack what Huawei actually announced
Lithography Masterclass
Spend one hour here and you've caught up on the entire arc of semiconductor lithography. Austin and Vik run a masterclass on the technology that decides who gets to make leading-edge chips, and why so few companies can afford to. The thread
Cerebras IPO
Cerebras IPO is the only thing to talk about this week. 🔥 IPO prices at $185/share. Pops nearly 70% right after. The first wafer-scale chip company to make it public — after a 40-year curse killed every prior attempt. A water-cooler-style
Gimlet's Cross-Vendor Inference Cloud
Gimlet Labs runs an inference cloud built on heterogeneous silicon. Their software traces a PyTorch workload, segments it into its component parts, and schedules each piece onto the best-suited hardware — connecting chips from different ven
Power as the Next Physics Wall for AI
What's common to optics and power that ruins everything in the era of AI? Resistance. The same physics that drove interconnects to optics is now driving low-voltage power delivery up to 800V. Austin Lyons (Chipstrat) and Vik Sekar (Vik's Ne
