AI Infrastructure At A Crossroads


By Ramin Farjadrad and Syrus Ziai There is a big push to achieve greater scale, performance and sustainability to fuel the AI revolution. More speed, more memory bandwidth, less power — these are the holy grails. Naturally, the one-two punch of StarGate and DeepSeek last week has raised many questions in our ecosystem and with our various stakeholders. Can DeepSeek be real? And if so, w... » read more

DeepSeek: Improving Language Model Reasoning Capabilities Using Pure Reinforcement Learning


A new technical paper titled "DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning" was published by DeepSeek. Abstract: "We introduce our first-generation reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1. DeepSeek-R1-Zero, a model trained via large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a preliminary step, demonstrates rema... » read more

The Road To Super Chips


Reticle size limitations are forcing chip design teams to look beyond a single SoC or processor in order to achieve orders of magnitude improvements in processing that are required for AI. But moving data between more processing elements adds a whole new set of challenges that need to be addressed at multiple levels. Steve Woo, distinguished inventor and fellow at Rambus, examines the benefits ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


The new Trump administration was quick to put a different stamp on the tech world: President Trump rescinded a long list of Biden’s executive orders, including those aimed at AI safety and the mandate for 50% EVs by 2030. Roughly 1.3 million EVs were sold in the U.S. in 2024, up 7.3% from 2023. The new administration announced $500 billion ($100 billion initially) in private sector in... » read more

Automotive OEMs Face Multiple Technology Adoption Challenges


Experts At The Table: The automotive ecosystem is in the midst of significant change. OEMs and tiered providers are grappling with how to deal with legacy technology while incorporating ever-increasing levels of autonomy, electrification, and software-defined vehicle concepts, just to name a few. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these and other related issues with Wayne Lyons, seni... » read more

How Ultra Ethernet And UALink Enable High-Performance, Scalable AI Networks


By Ron Lowman and Jon Ames AI workloads are significantly driving innovation in the interface IP market. The exponential increase in AI model parameters, doubling approximately every 4-6 months, stands in stark contrast to the slower pace of hardware advancements dictated by Moore's Law, which follows an 18-month cycle. This discrepancy demands hardware innovations to support AI workloads, c... » read more

Choosing The Right Memory Solution For AI Accelerators


To meet the increasing demands of AI workloads, memory solutions must deliver ever-increasing performance in bandwidth, capacity, and efficiency. From the training of massive large language models (LLMs) to efficient inference on endpoint devices, choosing the right memory technology is critical for chip designers. This blog explores three leading memory solutions—HBM, LPDDR, and GDDR—and t... » read more

MACs Are Not Enough: Why “Offload” Fails


For the past half-decade, countless chip designers have approached the challenges of on-device machine learning inference with the simple idea of building a “MAC accelerator” – an array of high-performance multiply-accumulate circuits – paired with a legacy programmable core to tackle the ML inference compute problem. There are literally dozens of lookalike architectures in the market t... » read more

2025: So Many Possibilities


The stage is set for a year of innovation in the chip industry, unlike anything seen for decades, but what makes this period of advancement truly unique is the need to focus on physics and real design skills. Planar scaling of SoCs enabled design and verification tools and methodologies to mature on a relatively linear path, but the last few years have created an environment for more radical... » read more

What’s The Best Way To Sell An Inference Engine?


The burgeoning AI market has seen innumerable startups funded on the strength of their ideas about building faster, lower-power, and/or lower-cost AI inference engines. Part of the go-to-market dynamic has involved deciding whether to offer a chip or IP — with some newcomers pivoting between chip and IP implementations of their ideas. The fact that some companies choose to sell chips while... » read more

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