Physical AI is an emerging hot trend, popularly associated with robotics though it has much wider scope than compute systems interacting with the physical world. For any domain in which analysis rests on differential equations (foundational in physics), the transformer-based systems behind LLMs are not the best fit for machine… Read More
Artificial Intelligence
NanoIC Extends Its PDK Portfolio with First A14 Logic and eDRAM Memory PDK
NanoIC has announced a major expansion of its process design kit portfolio with the introduction of its first A14 logic and embedded eDRAM memory PDK. This milestone reflects the company’s growing role in enabling advanced semiconductor design at cutting-edge technology nodes and addresses increasing industry demand for… Read More
How Switzerland Built a Global Semiconductor Edge by Thinking Smaller
By Alain-Serge Porret, Vice President, Integrated & Wireless Systems, CSEM
Since ramping up several years ago, the global semiconductor and artificial intelligence (AI) race has been driven by scale, from building larger data centers, developing bigger and more powerful models, and with them, increasingly complex and… Read More
How 25G Ethernet, PCIe 5.0, and Multi-Protocol PHYs Enable Scalable Edge Intelligence
Physical AI is changing how intelligent systems interact with the real world. These systems must sense, process, and respond to data in real time. Unlike cloud AI, Physical AI depends on fast local processing and reliable distributed communication. This shift creates a new challenge. Systems must move large volumes of sensor… Read More
The 71st International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM 2025)
It is hard to believe this conference is older than most all of the participants, including myself. The amount of history behind this conference is amazing. Back in 1955 the meeting began as the Electron Devices Meeting (EDM), organized by what later became the IEEE Electron Devices Society. Its core purpose was to bring together… Read More
Podcast EP329: How Marvell is Addressing the Power Problem for Advanced Data Centers with Mark Kuemerle
Daniel is joined by Mark Kuemerle, Vice President of Technology, Custom Cloud Solutions at Marvell. Mark is responsible for defining leading-edge ASIC offerings and architects system-level solutions. Before joining Marvell, Mark was a Fellow in Integrated Systems Architecture at GLOBALFOUNDRIES and has held multiple engineering… Read More
2025 Retrospective. Innovation in Verification
As usual in January we start with a look back at the papers we reviewed last year. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and lecturer at Stanford, EE292A) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome.
Looking back at 2025
… Read MoreSynopsys’ Secure Storage Solution for OTP IP
For decades, One-Time Programmable (OTP) memory has been viewed as a foundational element of hardware security. Because OTP can be written only once and cannot be modified afterward, it has traditionally been trusted to store cryptographic keys, secure boot code, device identity, and configuration data. Permanence was often… Read More
Hierarchical Device Planning as an Enabler of System Technology Co-Optimization
AI, hyperscale data centers, and data-intensive workloads are driving unprecedented demands for performance, bandwidth, and energy efficiency. As the economic returns of traditional transistor scaling diminish, advanced IC packaging and heterogeneous integration have become the primary levers for system-level scaling.… Read More
Agentic at the Edge in Automotive and Industry
It might seem from popular debate around AI and agentic that everything in this field is purely digital, initiated through text or voice prompts, often cloud-based or on-prem. But that view misses so much. AI is already an everyday experience at the edge, for voice-based control, in object detection and safety-triggered braking… Read More


TSMC Process Simplification for Advanced Nodes