AI Bubble Or Boom?


Are we in an AI bubble? Parallels are being drawn to the dot.com boom/bust of 1999-2000. In the dot.com bust, many high-tech companies valuations soared up 10X, then deflated. The peak P/E ratio for the Nasdaq Composite was 200! Remember Webvan? It went public November 1999 with an $8 billion valuation, then filed for bankruptcy 19 months later. It was much speculation without profits or gro... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit kicked off this week in San Jose, dominated by open standards, massive scaling of AI infrastructure, chiplet architectures, and energy-efficiency. Among the highlights: An initiative to standardize data center infrastructure and advance Ethernet for AI. New contributions to OCP's Open Chiplet Economy ecosystem, including Arm's new Foundation Chiplet... » read more

Frequency-Impedence Verification Of Power Delivery Network With HyperLynx PI For AMD Versal Adaptive SoC Devices


HyperLynx Decoupling analysis and the PDN Decoupling Optimizer are powerful tools for exploring various PDN structures and decoupling strategies. This paper presents a study showcasing the advantages of performing a HyperLynx decoupling analysis to verify PDN performance, and it highlights the extensive collaboration between Siemens and AMD in creating a complete system design flow for performi... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Oct. 13


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=482 /] Find more semiconductor research papers here. » read more

On-Package Memory With UCIe To Improve Bandwidth Density And Power Efficiency (AMD, Intel Corp.)


A new technical paper titled "On-Package Memory with Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe): A Low Power, High Bandwidth, Low Latency and Low Cost Approach" was published by researchers at Intel Corporation and AMD. Abstract "Emerging computing applications such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) are facing a memory wall with existing on-package memory solutions that are unable to meet ... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


SEMICON West was held in Phoenix this week, with presentations covering heterogeneous integration, AI, quantum, supply chain resilience, and more. Amid the buzz of the conference, some key manufacturing and test announcements were made this week: The strategic importance of the Phoenix area hub was highlighted. Amkor Technology broke ground this week on its advanced packaging and test camp... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Samsung and SK hynix joined OpenAI's Stargate initiative to ensure there will be enough memory chips to meet the needs of AI data centers. The goal is to produce up to 900,000 DRAM wafer starts per month. OpenAI also inked agreements to explore the development of next-gen data centers in Korea. Axcelis Technologies (ion implantation systems) will merge with Veeco Instruments (compound semic... » read more

New Spectre Branch Target Injection, Spectre-BTI, Attack Primitives On CPUs (ETH Zurich)


A new technical paper titled “VMSCAPE: Exposing and Exploiting Incomplete Branch Predictor Isolation in Cloud Environments” was published by researchers at ETH Zurich. Abstract “Virtualization is a cornerstone of modern cloud infrastructures, providing the required isolation to customers. This isolation, however, is threatened by speculative execution attacks which the CPU vendors att... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The U.S. is considering annual approvals for Samsung and SK hynix to export chipmaking tools and materials to their factories in China, replacing perpetual waivers granted under the validated end user system, reports Bloomberg. The proposal, presented by the U.S. Commerce Department to South Korean officials, would require the companies to reapply each year for specific quantities of restricted... » read more

What Do LLMs Want from Hardware


Figure 1: Noam Shazeer, Google Gemini vice president, presented this in his Hot Chips 2025 talk. Noam Shazeer is Google’s vice president of engineering for Gemini, their LLM competitor to ChatGPT. He talked recently at Hot Chips: “Predictions for the Next Phase of AI." He has worked on LLMs for a decade since inventing the transformer model in 2017. As his slide says, LLMs can take adv... » read more

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