Intel’s next big opportunity could come from something that sounds spectacularly unglamorous: connecting tiny pieces of silicon. Advanced packaging rarely attracts the attention lavished on powerful processors or artificial intelligence models. Yet it increasingly determines how effectively those technologies perform.… Read More
High-NA’s Obituary Was Premature
High numerical aperture EUV lithography was supposed to be the next step in semiconductor manufacturing. Then came the doubts: expensive scanners, smaller exposure fields, difficult economics and big customers finding ways to stretch existing equipment. It became tempting to confuse a delayed adoption curve with a technology… Read More
TSMC’s Patent and the Harsh Realities of 3D DRAM Competition
Discussions around TSMC’s vertical DRAM patents raise an intriguing question: could the world’s leading foundry eventually challenge established memory manufacturers? The curiosity is understandable. Patent disclosures involving vertical transistors and integrated capacitors show that TSMC is exploring architectures… Read More
How AI is Reshaping Semiconductor Design and Manufacturing
While AI is transforming nearly every industry, some of its most significant advances are happening inside the semiconductor factories building the chips that power it. If you design AI systems, those manufacturing advances directly influence your performance, efficiency, and path to market.
SEMICON West 2026: AI Made the Steps Faster. The Time Between Them Is Next.
The semiconductor industry crossed $1 trillion in annual revenue this year, almost four years ahead of earlier projections. SEMI President and CEO Ajit Manocha opened the CEO Summit at SEMICON West with a chart that told the story. A year ago, the forecast for 2030 was $1 trillion. Now it is $2 trillion, with $3 trillion possible … Read More
From Metrology to Autonomy: Why Intel Foundry’s Manufacturing Roadmap Matters
Semiconductor manufacturing has always depended on precise measurement. As devices become more complex and packaging integrates more components, however, measuring individual process steps is no longer enough. Manufacturers need to understand how decisions across fabrication, assembly, and test affect the finished … Read More
The Wafer Is the New Battleground: Soitec CPO René Jonker on Building AI from the Substrate Up
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
When Nanomagnets Do the Math: France’s New Machine for Impossible Choices
French researchers have demonstrated a hybrid nanoelectronic “Ising machine” designed to solve difficult combinatorial optimization problems more efficiently. The experimental system combines two emerging device technologies—resistive memory and spintronics—to perform parts of an optimization algorithm through… Read More
Inside the Package Powering Modern AI
TSMC’s CoWoS-S is critical to the artificial intelligence era because it solves the central systems problem facing modern accelerators: computing capability is growing faster than conventional packages can supply data, power, and connectivity. CoWoS-S, meaning Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate with a silicon interposer, … Read More
From Sequential R&D to Trusted Co-Innovation: The EPIC Model for Semiconductor Innovation
The semiconductor industry has long depended on collaboration between technology developers, equipment suppliers and manufacturers. But as artificial intelligence reshapes computing, established ways of working together may no longer be sufficient. The next wave of innovation will depend not just on what companies develop,… Read More


Intel’s Tiny Bridges Could Lead to Very Big Paychecks