Daniel is joined by David Liberman, a Los Angeles-based futurist, serial entrepreneur, investor, and former Director of Products at Snap, as well as the co-creator of the Gonka protocol. Gonka is a decentralized protocol that connects people who need computing power for AI with operators who provide GPU hardware. Its goal is … Read More
TSMC’s CoPoS, generally described as Chip-on-Panel-on-Substrate, and Intel’s EMIB, or Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge, address the same strategic problem: integrating increasingly large, heterogeneous chiplet systems. However, they attack different physical constraints. CoPoS is an emerging panel-level … Read More
The “Silicon Shield” describes the idea that Taiwan’s central role in advanced semiconductor manufacturing raises the economic and strategic cost of military action against the island. The shield is not a literal defense system. It is a form of structural deterrence created by technological concentration: governments and… Read More
Global unit shipments of PCs and smartphones were both down versus a year ago in the 2nd quarter of 2026, according to IDC. PCs were down 4.9% and smartphones were down 6.7%. Both PCs and smartphones showed growth in 2024 and 2025. IDC is predicting an 11.3% decline in PCs and a 13.9% decline in smartphones in 2026.
What is causing the… Read More
The face of EDA is changing. For forty years, this industry has focused on optimizing algorithms for design, verification and implementation of chips. That work has delivered some ground-breaking innovations. Logic synthesis is a good example. There are so many more. Thanks to the innovations commonly referred to as Frontier… Read More
This year, DAC will be buzzing about AI from every direction. The debate of build vs. buy will also be a popular topic. And the debate of who owns the intellectual property embodied in chip designs and how to control it will also get a significant amount of airtime. These are all interesting and compelling discussion points. It turns… Read More
Bronco AI builds AI agents for chip design and verification. Our goal is to get teams from spec to RTL-freeze as fast as possible by surfacing the nastiest bugs sooner and fixing them faster.
Our agents work the way strong engineers do: they read the spec, form hypotheses, run experiments, and chase a problem until it is root-caused,… Read More
Automated debugging – starting from an unexpected behavior to find a bug root-cause or a small set of possible root-causes – is a hot topic now that agentic systems are playing a bigger role in automation. Unsurprising since debug remains the most time and resource-consuming aspect of verification, in turn the most time/resource-consuming… Read More
Si2 is conducting quite a few sessions at DAC this year covering everything from power model standards to agentic AI. There is one session that is a bit different, focusing on LLM benchmarking. Since AI is popping up everywhere, the ability to accurately assess and measure the quality of new models becomes more important. That’s… Read More
Dan Fritchman is an electrical engineer and semiconductor-software entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Generation Alpha Transistor, a San Francisco startup developing AI-based tools for integrated-circuit design.
He earned a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley in 2023. His dissertation,… Read More
TSMC CoWoS versus Intel EMIB Semiconductor Packaging