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
Samsung Might Be the Most Unusual Company on Earth
Samsung might be the most unusual company on earth because it is difficult to decide what kind of company it actually is. To most consumers, Samsung means smartphones, televisions, refrigerators. Yet the name also appears on apartment towers, cargo ships, hospital equipment, insurance policies, construction projects, and… 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
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
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
High-NA EUV Moves From Experiment to Manufacturing
Intel Foundry and ASML say high-numerical-aperture extreme-ultraviolet lithography has crossed an important boundary: it is no longer only a development tool, but a production technology. At the SPIE Photomask Technology and Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography conference, the companies reported that Intel has processed … 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
When Design Gets Faster, the Bottleneck Moves Through the Physical Stack
AI can compress the path to tape-out. The next challenge is compressing physical realization.
Something important is beginning to happen in semiconductor development: the design cycle itself is becoming compressible.
AI-assisted engineering can accelerate architecture exploration, RTL development, verification, physical… Read More
Comparing Advanced Packaging from TSMC, Intel Foundry, and Samsung Foundry
Advanced semiconductor packaging has become essential to improving computing performance as conventional transistor scaling grows more difficult and expensive. Instead of manufacturing an entire processor as one large monolithic die, chipmakers can divide it into smaller chiplets and combine logic, memory, input/output… Read More
Semicon West: Transforming Tomorrow One Chip at a Time
SEMICON West 2026 arrives at a pivotal moment for the global chip industry. Scheduled for October 13–15 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, the event returns to the Bay Area after its 2025 edition in Phoenix. Organized by SEMI under the theme “Transform Tomorrow,” it will bring together semiconductor manufacturers, equipment… Read More


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