Artificial intelligence is moving rapidly from an experimental aid to a foundational part of semiconductor engineering. In a recent industry talk, leaders from ChipAgents and Analog Devices described how agentic AI could help chipmakers manage soaring design complexity, accelerate product development, and improve the … Read More
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
PDF Solutions CONNECT 2026: Where Semiconductor Data Meets AI
The semiconductor industry is entering a period in which manufacturing leadership will depend not simply on producing more data, but on turning that data into timely, trustworthy decisions. PDF Solutions CONNECT 2026 is designed around this challenge. Taking place October 15–16 at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco, the… 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
2026 Ceva Edge Symposium: Building Intelligence Beyond the Cloud
The 2026 Ceva Edge Symposium will bring together engineers, technology leaders, ecosystem partners, and innovators to explore a major shift in computing: moving artificial intelligence from distant cloud infrastructure into the devices that interact directly with the physical world. Scheduled for November 2 in Hsinchu,… Read More
HBM’s Second Act: When Memory Starts Thinking
Samsung’s Hot Chips 2026 presentation, “HBM Base Die: How HBM Will Evolve Using Advanced Logic Processes,” argues that the base die beneath a High Bandwidth Memory stack is about to become far more than a communications layer. Traditionally, an HBM base die mainly connects stacked DRAM dies to a GPU, TPU, or other processor and … Read More
NVIDIA Vera: Rebuilding the CPU for Agentic AI
Source: Jonathon Evans and Polychronis Xekalakis, “NVIDIA Vera CPU,” Hot Chips 2026. Performance figures are NVIDIA claims, and several results were based on preproduction or unofficial testing.
NVIDIA’s Vera CPU is a server processor designed specifically for agentic AI, where language models repeatedly observe, reason,… Read More
ASML and TSMC’s 12-Inch Photomask Initiative: Technical Significance
ASML and TSMC’s proposed shift from 6-inch to 12-inch photomasks is an attempt to redesign a critical but often overlooked part of advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Photomasks are precision plates carrying the circuit patterns projected by a lithography scanner onto a silicon wafer. In extreme-ultraviolet lithography,… Read More


ASML Has High-NA and Chipmakers Can’t Say No