I spent a significant part of my career in the ASIC business. This segment of semiconductors has always been challenging, difficult and invigorating. There is something special about delivering a working custom chip that enables your customer to bring a world-changing product to market. It has always been a highly competitive… Read More
The Pivotal Moments That Gave Rise to Silicon Valley
The little-known decisions and breakthroughs—and the remarkable role of Robert Noyce—that helped shape the modern semiconductor industry
by Sunil Mehta
When people tell the story of how Silicon Valley came into being, they usually begin with a familiar sequence of events.
The transistor was invented at Bell Labs. William Shockley… Read More
Why Advanced Chip Packaging Is Becoming a Design Problem
As chipmakers put more computing power into a single system, the challenge extends beyond making individual chips faster. They must connect multiple chips, memory stacks, power supplies, and sometimes optical components in a compact package. In the2026 TSMC OIP Forum talk “Addressing Inter-Die Complexity for 3D Multi-Die… Read More
Siemens and TSMC push AI deeper into chip design
Siemens and TSMC are expanding their collaboration on semiconductor design tools, with a focus on AI assisted workflows, advanced chip packaging and support for newer manufacturing processes. Their announcement centers on an AI agent intended to find and fix design rule violations: errors that can prevent a chip layout from… Read More
TSMC OIP Ecosystem Forum 2026: Opening Remarks
The 2026 TSMC Open Innovation Platform (OIP) Ecosystem Forum was held on September 23, 2026, in Santa Clara, CA. This is the event where TSMC showcases the substantial progress made with its massive semiconductor ecosystem. As one would expect, AI was a key topic throughout the day, with some very impressive results reported and… Read More
Designing chips for the AI era: what TSMC’s roadmap means
About twenty years ago I worked with Cliff Hou, LC Lu, and the TSMC PDK team on reference flows with emerging EDA and IP companies. This was the precursor to the OIP. Having a person with LC Lu’s depth of R&D experience running the TSMC Design & Technology Platform is truly an honor, absolutely.
AI is creating two related… Read More
The Intelligence Revolution: TSMC’s OIP Ecosystem Forges the Path to Trillion-Transistor AI Systems
At the 2026 OIP Ecosystem Forum, the industry narrative shifted from incremental scaling to what TSMC defines as the “Intelligence Revolution.” Akin to the 18th-century Industrial Revolution which transitioned human physical labor to mechanical power, the current era is augmenting human ingenuity through … Read More
Podcast EP368: An Overview of TSMC Open Innovation Platform (OIP) event with Aveek Sarkar
Daniel is joined by Aveek Sarkar, who heads TSMC’s Ecosystem and Alliance Management Division. Along with his team, he is responsible for driving semiconductor design enablement in collaboration with the partner ecosystem through TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform® (OIP). Prior to TSMC, Aveek worked on chip designs at Sun Microsystems… Read More
Silicon Valley, à la Française – One Year On
One Year Later — September 2026
When this piece first ran a year ago, VSORA was the quiet outsider, a company with a bold architecture and no Silicon Valley address. One year on, the thesis has held up better than even its author expected. In January 2026, Sandra Rivera, former CEO of Altera and, before that, a two-decade Intel veteran… Read More
The State of the U.S. Semiconductor Manufacturing Workforce 2026 Benchmark Report
America’s semiconductor workforce is entering a decisive growth period, but employment capacity is not yet keeping pace with investment. New fabrication plants, packaging facilities, and supplier expansions are creating demand for thousands of engineers, technicians, operators, and skilled tradespeople. Whether the… Read More


The silent killer of analog reliability: Why SPICE misses floating net