Jensen Huang’s declaration that “AGI has arrived” is less a scientific verdict than a compressed statement about infrastructure, economics and momentum. His evidence is OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, reportedly trained on more than 100,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell NVL72 systems, followed by a promise that another 400,000 GPUs are coming… Read More
Artificial Intelligence
TSMC’s 2026 OIP Forum to Spotlight the Technologies Shaping the Next Era of Chips
It’s that time of year again. Time certainly flies when AI is chasing you! This year marks the 18th TSMC OIP Ecosystem Forum, and it promises to be bigger and better than ever. My SemiWiki partners, Mike Gianfagna and Kalar Rajendiran, will join me in covering the event live, so stay tuned for all the news that’s fit to print.
Mike and… Read More
Webinar – Avestra Explains How to Achieve Assertion Driven Silicon Success
Studies have shown that nearly 20% of the verification cycle is spent on assertion generation, debugging, and methodology integration. This work remains largely manual today or is delegated to general-purpose LLMs that can produce incorrect assertions more than 30% of the time. Avestra attacks this problem with agentic AI … Read More
Webinar – ChipAgents Shows You How to Break the Timing Closure Bottleneck with AI
We all know timing closure is one of the most challenging processes in chip design. Extracting actionable insight from massive timing reports, tracing violations back to RTL, and selecting the right fix across complex PPA tradeoffs all require deep expertise. And every change can trigger hours or days of tool runs and cross-team… Read More
Jalapeño Hot Chip, Cool Power Bill: OpenAI Turns Up the Heat on AI Inference
OpenAI’s Jalapeño is a custom accelerator designed specifically for AI inference, particularly the low-latency, multi-chip workloads behind interactive and agentic systems. Its central idea is that useful performance cannot be reduced to peak floating-point operations or memory bandwidth. What matters is how quickly … Read More
The $9.5 Billion Design IP Market: Shifting Boundaries, Arm’s Monopoly, and the RISC-V Response
While semiconductor design intellectual property (IP) is a $9.45 billion market, it acts as the absolute architectural bottleneck for the entire global semiconductor value chain. The choices made at the IP layer today dictate the cost, power, and security of a downstream technology economy rapidly marching toward a trillion… Read More
Containing AI Agents With a Will of Their Own
Meta recently open-sourced a capable, large-scale agent model — 30 billion parameters, a rough measure of the model’s size and complexity. It’s free, downloadable, and runs, per Meta’s own benchmarks, on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Max or M5 Max chip and 32GB of memory. Their rationale is that powerful agents belong… Read More
DAC 2026: A Discussion of Who Owns the Intelligence Behind Tomorrow’s Chips and How to Make it Better
The industry is moving from simple documentation chatbots to agentic workflows capable of performing complex, multi-step tasks like design creation, verification, and library characterization. These agents are intended to enhance engineering productivity by roughly 50%. A panel of industry experts met at DAC to discuss… Read More
Follow the Money – Agentrys Raises $24.5 Million to Build Agentic Design Automation
Agentrys recently launched a new category of design technology, Agentic Design Automation (ADA). The approach promises to revolutionize AI deployment for chip design with technology that facilitates the building of targeted agentic design flows that get better with every run. There is a lot of information available on the … Read More
GenAlpha Brings a Practical Approach for Analog AI to DAC 2026
Agentic AI was everywhere at DAC 2026. Various focus areas were presented that covered many parts of the chip design flow. Verification and debug were a popular topic since so much time is spent there. Analog design is another pressure point. Every chip design has analog content. While the size of the analog blocks may not be huge,… Read More


ASML and TSMC’s 12-Inch Photomask Initiative: Technical Significance