PDF Solutions CONNECT 2026 Trip Report

PDF Solutions CONNECT 2026 Trip Report
by Lauro Rizzatti on 10-29-2026 at 8:00 am

PDF Solutions CONNECT 2026 trip report

On October 15–16, at the tail end of SEMICON West 2026, PDF Solutions held its 2026 CONNECT Conference at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco.

PDF Solutions Vitals
Santa Clara–based PDF Solutions is a semiconductor data, analytics, and connectivity company, founded in 1991. Today, its business rests on three pillars, all … Read More


The Wafer Is the New Battleground: Soitec CPO René Jonker on Building AI from the Substrate Up

The Wafer Is the New Battleground: Soitec CPO René Jonker on Building AI from the Substrate Up
by Lauro Rizzatti on 10-28-2026 at 8:00 am

Electric blue Soitec wafer cover

Most of the AI conversation stops at the chip. At SEMICON West 2026 I sat down with René Jonker, Chief Product Officer of Soitec, to talk about what sits underneath it.

Ask an engineer where AI performance comes from and you will hear about process nodes, dataflow, HBM stacks and interconnect fabrics. Rarely about the wafer. Yet a … Read More


SEMICON West 2026: After the Toast, the Hard Questions

SEMICON West 2026: After the Toast, the Hard Questions
by Lauro Rizzatti on 10-26-2026 at 6:00 am

Global Semiconductor Market 2026

Champagne is an unusual opening act for a semiconductor conference. At SEMICON West 2026, October 13 to 15, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, it served a purpose. The toast marked an industry that has already crossed $1 trillion in annual revenue, almost four years ahead of earlier projections.

WSTS (World Semiconductor … Read More


Beyond the Post-Mortem: How yieldHUB Live Turns the Test Floor Into an Open Window

Beyond the Post-Mortem: How yieldHUB Live Turns the Test Floor Into an Open Window
by Lauro Rizzatti on 10-21-2026 at 10:00 am

Live visibility on the semiconductor test floor (1)

At SEMICON West 2026 I sat down with John O’Donnell, founder and CEO, and Gillian O’Donnell, Director of Growth, to talk about how yieldHUB Live is transforming the semiconductor test floor from a blind spot into a real-time command center.

For decades, semiconductor test floors have operated as high-stakes black… Read More


VSORA’s Sandra Rivera on the Inference Era: Demand Is Real, But Not Everyone Survives

VSORA’s Sandra Rivera on the Inference Era: Demand Is Real, But Not Everyone Survives
by Lauro Rizzatti on 10-13-2026 at 8:00 am

Sandra Rivera and the inference era

Sandra Rivera, Chair of VSORA, joined Bloomberg’s The Close in July for an interview on the current state of AI. What follows is a summary of that conversation.

When a Silicon Valley veteran who once ran Intel’s Data Center and AI Group, and now chairs a French inference-chip challenger, sits down with a tech journalist from Bloomberg,… Read More


Built to Deliver the Answer, Not to Train the Model

Built to Deliver the Answer, Not to Train the Model
by Lauro Rizzatti on 10-06-2026 at 8:00 am

VSORA SemiWiki Post Sep 28 2026 Week


How VSORA rebalances memory and compute for AI inference in the data center and at the edge

For more than a decade, the AI hardware industry focused mainly on model training, while inference represented a smaller share of overall demand. That balance is changing as trained models are deployed widely in recommendation engines, … Read More


Pollen Metrology: From a Decade-Long Bet to a Proven AI Platform for Semiconductor Manufacturing

Pollen Metrology: From a Decade-Long Bet to a Proven AI Platform for Semiconductor Manufacturing
by Lauro Rizzatti on 09-29-2026 at 12:00 pm

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Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Johann Foucher, founder and CEO of Pollen Metrology, a French company whose journey offers a rare vantage point on how artificial intelligence is reshaping semiconductor manufacturing from the inside out. What makes Pollen Metrology’s story compelling isn’t just … Read More


Silicon Valley, à la Française – One Year On

Silicon Valley, à la Française – One Year On
by Lauro Rizzatti on 09-23-2026 at 8:00 am

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One Year Later — September 2026

When this piece first ran a year ago, VSORA was the quiet outsider, a company with a bold architecture and no Silicon Valley address. One year on, the thesis has held up better than even its author expected. In January 2026, Sandra Rivera, former CEO of Altera and, before that, a two-decade Intel veteran… Read More


Rethinking AI Chips: How VSORA Redesigned the Hardware That Runs AI

Rethinking AI Chips: How VSORA Redesigned the Hardware That Runs AI
by Lauro Rizzatti on 09-16-2026 at 6:00 am

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Instead of tweaking existing designs, VSORA built an AI chip from scratch to fix the real bottleneck: moving data fast enough to keep the math circuits busy.

There’s a version of the AI hardware story that everyone in the chip industry has heard a hundred times. A startup raises money on a clever chip design, promises to topple… Read More


Unified Emulation and Prototyping: Pipedream or Reality?

Unified Emulation and Prototyping: Pipedream or Reality?
by Lauro Rizzatti on 09-03-2026 at 10:00 am

Unified Emulation and Prototyping Pipedream or Reality Figure 1

Preamble
Hardware-assisted verification (HAV) platforms, including hardware emulators and FPGA-based prototyping systems, are the two dominant methodologies for validating long workloads on complex System-on-Chip (SoC) designs before tape-out. HAV sits within a broader continuum of verification engines: simulation… Read More