Semi Doped

Jaksot

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  TSMC Will Buy High NA After All: ASML's New 6x12-Inch Mask 14.09.2026 50min

  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 standard. Austin Lyons and Vik Sekar unpack the physics and economics of ASML's move to High NA, explaining why it necessitates a shift from 6-inch to 6x12-inch masks and what this means for the timelines of TSMC, Intel, and Samsung. "This is where you have to...
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  OpenAI’s Jalapeño! Feeling Hot Hot Hot! 27.08.2026 54min

  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 philosophy is "dark silicon is cheaper than idle accelerators" — using one balanced chip and power-gating unused blocks is more efficient than a two-chip (e.g. GPU + LPU) solution. - The unprecedented nine-month RTL-to-tapeout cycle was enabled by AI for EDA tool...
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  Grok Bots and How CPUs are used in Agentic AI 24.08.2026 44min

  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 Takeaways: - The 'Mac Mini Craze' wasn't about having a GPU on your desk — it was also about security, as users needed a sandboxed machine to run untrusted agent code like OpenClaw, a problem cloud VMs solve too. - In AI servers, the GPU is the 'genius' do...
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  Tensordyne's R K Anand: HPE Juniper Fabric, Logarithmic Math, MoE Inference, Air Cooling, 3nm 18.08.2026 55min

  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 HPE Juniper. The result is a high-density, air-cooled system designed to efficiently run massive Mixture-of-Experts models in existing data centers. Key Takeaways: - The core innovation isn't just log math, it's the patented method for accumulation. This tur...
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  NEWS TAKE: China's Optical Ban, Volta's $10B Anthropic Deal, AMD's Earnings 11.08.2026 34min

  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 CapEx spend despite strong earnings, and how a new company called Volta Infrastructure landed a $10B compute deal with Anthropic by pioneering a new financial model for AI. Key Takeaways: - The proposed ban on Chinese optical transceivers is based on a flawe...
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  GlobalFoundries Thomas Barber: CPO, Silicon Photonics, 300mm, SiGe, OCI, NRZ 07.08.2026 39min

  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 silicon photonics platform, and again with the specialty Silicon Germanium process the industry needs to drive it. "The enemy to me right now is copper. I'm trying to beat copper, right? If TSMC wins and we win, that's great because we're both displacing cop...
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  How Retimers Built an $80B Company: The Story of Astera Labs 31.07.2026 47min

  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: can Astera take switch share from Broadcom? Key Takeaways: - 30cm of PCB trace at Gen 5's 32 GT/s and the signal is gone. Signal integrity is an inside-the-server problem, not just a rack-to-rack one. - Gen 6 swaps NRZ for PAM4. Four voltage levels instead...
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  News Take: Hyperscaler CDS, SK Hynix Earnings, China's DUV 29.07.2026 17min

  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 then analyze the paradox of SK Hynix's massive stock drop despite record growth, and explain why China's new DUV lithography tool makes 3D chip stacking essential to their strategy. Key Takeaways: * Hyperscaler debt fears are quantified by rising credi...
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  Datacenter Interconnects: Copper vs. Optics, Nvidia's 78-Layer PCB, Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) 24.07.2026 49min

  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. optics. Topics include Nvidia's extreme measures to keep scale-up fabric electrical (a 78-layer mid-plane PCB), why Co-Packaged Optics is the "holy grail" everyone wants and no one can ship, and the serviceability problem standing in its way. Key Takeaways:...
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  PicoJool's Al Yuen: The Case for GaAs VCSELs in Scale-Up Interconnects 16.07.2026 49min

  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 can leverage existing supply chains to ship in the millions per month. They cover the roadmap from 1.6T to 12.8T, the trade-offs among 8×200G, 16×100G, and 32×50G, and the push to train the next generation of photonics engineers. The spec that changed is er...
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  WEKA's Val Bercovici: KV Cache, DeepSeek V4, HBF, SLC vs QLC NAND, CXL, NVLink, Tokenomics 10.07.2026 1t 4min

  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 cache optimizations, the future of NAND flash tiers, and the role of CXL in AI inference. The episode concludes with a look at predictive memory offloading and the AI flywheel. Chapters: 0:00 Welcome Val Bercovici, Weka 1:59 Memory situation and model rout...
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  Micron's Record Profits, Apple's CXMT Plea: AI is Eating All the Memory 03.07.2026 50min

  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 premium brands like Apple are struggling to secure supply, leading them to controversial suppliers. The hosts also explore the long-term implications of AI's insatiable memory appetite and its impact on both data center and consumer markets. Chapters: 0:00 Mem...
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  Qualcomm's HBC Memory, Alphawave, Modular, and more 29.06.2026 59min

  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 on the record. Vik watched the whole thing on YouTube. Together they break down what actually changed. The technical centerpiece is High Bandwidth Compute (HBC): stacking LPDDR on top of logic to expose the whole face of the chip for interconnects, claiming...
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  Advanced Packaging, TSMC CoWoS, Intel EMIB 19.06.2026 1t 9min

  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 bridgesEMIB embeds tiny bridges into the substrate, no interposerEMIB-T and EMIB-M add through-silicon vias and power capacitorsGoogle is booking 3M TPUs on EMIB via MediaTek by 2028Package sizes keep climbing: 5.5x reticle today, 40x aheadThis episode is br...
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  Computex Mania 2026: Optics and Power 12.06.2026 48min

  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 developments in AI hardware and interconnect technology. Connect with Vik and Austin via a daily free newsletter: https://www.semidoped.com Vik's Paid Substack: https://www.viksnewsletter.com Austin's Paid Substack: https://www.chipstrat.com Chapters 0...
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  Huawei's Tau Scaling Law: Is the "EUV Killer" Real? 29.05.2026 38min

  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 at ISCAS 2026 — and why the "EUV killer" headline gets the story backwards. They walk through the tau scaling law (tau is delay, and the idea is to attack it at the system level instead of the transistor), logic folding via hybrid bonding, the Kirin 2026 ...
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  Lithography Masterclass 22.05.2026 1t 3min

  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 is economics. An EUV machine runs about $400 million, a new fab needs roughly 15 of them, and the total bill clears $20-30 billion before a single wafer ships. Austin and Vik trace the whole story: Rock's Law and the cost of a fab, what it actually takes t...
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  Cerebras IPO 15.05.2026 50min

  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 convo on what Cerebras actually builds, why a 23 kW wafer is a power and cooling nightmare, why 44 GB of SRAM is both the magic and the wall for LLM inference, and the cursed Trilogy Systems saga that Gene Amdahl tried — and failed — to pull off in 1983. Why...
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  Gimlet's Cross-Vendor Inference Cloud 12.05.2026 48min

  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 vendors on a single high-speed fabric. In this interview, Gimlet co-founder Natalie Serrino and former Intel executive Beltir walk through the architecture (graph trace, optimal split points, lowering each segment to TensorRT on NVIDIA and equivalents elsewhe...
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  Power as the Next Physics Wall for AI 08.05.2026 41min

  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 Newsletter) unpack it using the Kyber rack as an example. At 600kW and 48V, you're pushing 12,500 amps through a single rack. Power loss scales with I². The math doesn't work. The fix is 800V — and the parts come straight from the EV traction inverter ecosyst...