Chip Industry Week In Review


Geopolitics U.S. lawmakers are urging tighter export controls on advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME) to China, warning existing loopholes threaten national security. "China is working to build domestic SME by exploiting access to U.S. and allied subcomponents required to produce tools," states the letter, which also says better coordination with allies is essential. The U.S.... » read more

AI, GPU, And HPC Data Centers: The Infrastructure Behind Modern AI


Artificial intelligence (AI) is stretching compute infrastructure well beyond what traditional enterprise data centers were designed to handle. Modern AI training requires massively parallel compute, low-latency networking, high-throughput storage pipelines, and facility engineering that can safely support higher rack power densities than legacy environments. These demands are fueling the eme... » read more

Silicon Photonics In The Data Center: What A CMOS Exec Needs To Know


Silicon Photonics is changing the data center, with the biggest changes still ahead. Figure 1: Google Jupiter Network for multi-thousand Ironwood TPU clusters. Source: Google Refresher for new readers: Data centers contain hundreds or thousands of racks. For example, the Nvidia GB200 NVL72 AI compute/switch rack is about 24 inches wide, about 88 inches high and 42 inches deep. I... » read more

GDDR7 Momentum Accelerates As A Key Solution For AI Inference


The AI hardware landscape continues to evolve at a breakneck speed, and memory technology is rapidly becoming a defining differentiator for the next generation of GPUs and AI inference accelerators. When NVIDIA introduced Rubin CPX, its new class of GPU tailored for massive context inference, it underscored a new industry reality: memory throughput and efficiency are now just as critical as ra... » read more

Liquid Cooling Gains Traction In Data Centers


All electronics generate heat, and that heat must be removed to ensure those electronics don’t overheat. Moving air has been the predominant approach for decades, with liquid cooling limited to particularly intense computing workloads, largely in the supercomputing domain. With the rise in AI, data-center power density has grown to the point where liquid cooling is now seeing a larger buil... » read more

PCIe Technology in Switches


Two benefits of using PCIe switches include accessibility to more endpoints and enabling data center disaggregation. Rambus's Lou Ternullo and Wesley Yung from Astera Labs discuss benefits, use cases, and PCIe technology used in switches in this video from PCI-SIG. Hear more about the technology here. » read more

Data Centers Need High Reliability Semiconductors


“In the world of designing cars, planes, AI factories … you’ve got to be perfect," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on CNBC last month. "And the reason for this is because there is so much at stake.” Cars and planes need to be extremely reliable because people die if they aren’t. In AI data centers, no one dies when systems fail, but the economic impact is gigantic because Amazon, Goog... » read more

2025 – A Year Of Change And Anticipation


2025 has certainly been a year of unexpected changes. These had a significant impact on the semiconductor industry and everything that supports it. Not all the changes have been bad, but flexibility has been a requirement for continued success or to make the most of an opportunity provided. Some industries, such as aerospace and defense, are seeing a significant boost around the world. Data ... » read more

Limited by Power


AI is seen as a massive computation problem, but that is not the case, at least with the way that the problem is structured today. It is a data movement problem. This not only limits performance but represents most of the energy consumption. In addition, the industry spends most of its time and effort making small improvements that optimize aspects of the existing architecture, when what is ... » read more

AI Buildout Makes HPC Simulation More Challenging


Simulations of semiconductors and systems are becoming bigger, more complex, and increasingly necessary, mirroring everything that is happening to the hardware itself — particularly in AI data centers. The move beyond monolithic chips to multi-die assemblies now requires solving some thorny multi-physics challenges, such as thermal and power delivery, which are increasingly difficult to mo... » read more

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