The reported move of Amit Gupta, Jeff Dyck, and Ryan Silk from Siemens EDA to Synopsys matters because this is more than a routine transfer of experienced executives and engineers. Together, the three represent a concentrated body of expertise in applying artificial intelligence to semiconductor design—one of the most strategically… Read More
Reducing EUV Exposure Dose Through Underlayer EngineeringExtreme-ultraviolet lithography is essential for manufacturing advanced semiconductor…Read More
The Twelve-Month Rule Does Not Describe a New FabBy Nikhil Shah Capital spending is often treated…Read More
How TSMC Is Wiring the AI Era With LightTSMC’s photonics strategy is centered on integrating optical…Read More
Intel Eyes a Memory Comeback as AI Rewrites Chip EconomicsIntel is considering a return to memory technology…Read MoreIntel Wildcat Lake: Right-Sizing Silicon Without Sinking Performance
Lance Hacking, Intel
Intel Core Series 3, code-named Wildcat Lake, is a mainstream client system-on-chip derived from the Panther Lake-based Core Ultra Series 3 architecture. Its design objective is not maximum feature density, but broad deployment of current-generation CPU, graphics, AI, memory, security, and connectivity… Read More
Webinar: Warpage has a Timing Problem
In advanced packaging, warpage is rarely a modeling problem. It is a timing problem.
JOHN BRUGGEMAN
By the time many advanced packages undergo high-fidelity thermo-mechanical analysis, a long chain of decisions has already been made. Stackup. Materials. Die placement. Package architecture. Each decision constrains the … Read More
Optimizing for Thermoelastic in Package and PCB Design from the Outset
Signoff-quality design tools are mandatory for signoff, though not so good for early design exploration. Signoff demands high accuracy in design description and high precision in analysis. The first requirement can’t be met early in design where architecture decisions are still in flux, and the second depends on very detailed… Read More
Avestra: Agentic AI for SystemVerilog Assertion Generation
Modern ASIC, SoC, CPU, and GPU development depends on verification processes that detect subtle functional defects before tapeout. SystemVerilog Assertions (SVA) are particularly important because they encode temporal design intent: how signals, states, and transactions must behave across clock cycles. Unlike conventional… Read More
RISC-V at Sixteen: From Modular ISA to Standardized Platforms at Hot Chips 2026
RISC-V has evolved from a Berkeley research architecture into a global instruction-set standard spanning embedded controllers, application processors, accelerators, and emerging servers. Its defining technical characteristic is not merely openness, but disciplined modularity. Four ratified base ISAs—RV32I, RV64I,… Read More
Hot Chips: Evolving Memory Architectures for Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence performance is increasingly constrained by memory rather than arithmetic throughput. Scaling laws show that model quality improves when parameter count, training data, and compute grow together, but this balance fails when processors cannot obtain operands quickly enough. Contemporary accelerators… Read More
Synopsys Cloud at DAC 2026
Cloud-based EDA has been around for awhile now, so at #DAC2026 I met with Vikram Bhatia, Executive Director of Synopsys Cloud to see what’s new with their offering. His background includes stints at Sun, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Oracle and NetApp. The Synopsys Cloud FlexEDA lets designs teams run their EDA solutions inside of a web browser,… Read More
The Sky’s the Limit: SiFive’s BigSky Brings RISC-V to the Datacenter
SiFive is bringing RISC-V closer to mainstream datacenter deployment with the BigSky SF-2U870, an enterprise-grade development server designed for hyperscalers, semiconductor companies, software vendors, and ecosystem partners. Announced in Santa Clara on August 24, 2026, alongside Hot Chips, the rackable 2U platform… Read More
What Hot Chips 2026 Tells Us About What Silicon Valley Is Actually Building
Here’s what the presentations selected for the 2026 Hot Chips Conference tell us about what Silicon Valley companies are doing these days.
The conference, running this week at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium, doesn’t publish detailed abstracts ahead of time, but the program itself, just the lineup of who’s presenting what, … Read More



Intel Wildcat Lake: Right-Sizing Silicon Without Sinking Performance