Semi Doped

Pacing AI Means More Compute, Not Less

The debate over "pacing" AI for safety is a red herring, as the practical outcome of more safety work is not a slowdown but a net increase in demand for compute hardware.

TSMC Will Buy High NA After All: ASML's New 6x12-Inch Mask

The emergence of user-friendly AI agents is creating massive new hardware demand, which in turn is forcing the semiconductor industry into a complex, multi-year transitio

OpenAI’s Jalapeño! Feeling Hot Hot Hot!

Austin and Vik react to OpenAI's Jalapeño announcement at Hot Chips. Plus extra spicy questions like should OpenAI sell it, how much of this was AI-written RTL, and

Grok Bots and How CPUs are used in Agentic AI

The rise of user-friendly agentic AI platforms will create a massive new demand category for dedicated, high-core-count "agentic CPUs" to execute tasks in parallel, funda

Tensordyne's R K Anand: HPE Juniper Fabric, Logarithmic Math, MoE Inference, Air Cooling, 3nm

Tensordyne co-founder and CPO R K Anand joins Austin to discuss the company's strategy for disrupting AI inference. RK explains how Tensordyne combines power-efficie

NEWS TAKE: China's Optical Ban, Volta's $10B Anthropic Deal, AMD's Earnings

Austin Lyons and Vik Sekar break down three stories that hit semis last week. They analyze a proposed US ban on Chinese optical transceivers that threatens to cut off 50%

GlobalFoundries Thomas Barber: CPO, Silicon Photonics, 300mm, SiGe, OCI, NRZ

The physical limits of copper are forcing a shift to optical interconnects in AI data centers. Austin sits down with GlobalFoundries' Thomas Barber to unpack why GF

How Retimers Built an $80B Company: The Story of Astera Labs

A retimer is a small, unglamorous chip. Astera turned it into a high-margin franchise. Austin and Vik cover why copper gives up at PCIe speeds, what a retimer does that a

News Take: Hyperscaler CDS, SK Hynix Earnings, China's DUV

Austin Lyons and Vik Sekar break down the market's recent volatility. They discuss the rising fear around hyperscaler debt, visible in credit default swap (CDS) prem

Datacenter Interconnects: Copper vs. Optics, Nvidia's 78-Layer PCB, Co-Packaged Optics (CPO)

Vik Sekar and Austin Lyons tackle the biggest bottleneck in inference: moving data. They break down the three tiers of datacenter networking — scale up, scale out, scale

PicoJool's Al Yuen: The Case for GaAs VCSELs in Scale-Up Interconnects

Al Yuen, CEO of PicoJool, talks with Austin about using VCSELs for scale-up optical interconnects in AI data centers. Al explains why gallium arsenide (GaAs) supply is un

WEKA's Val Bercovici: KV Cache, DeepSeek V4, HBF, SLC vs QLC NAND, CXL, NVLink, Tokenomics

Vik welcomes Val Bercovici from Weka to discuss the rapidly evolving landscape of AI memory and storage. Val explains how Weka's architecture leverages high-bandwidt

Micron's Record Profits, Apple's CXMT Plea: AI is Eating All the Memory

Austin and Vik break down the current memory crisis, where AI demand is driving unprecedented profits for memory makers like Micron, while simultaneously causing inflatio

Qualcomm's HBC Memory, Alphawave, Modular, and more

Qualcomm flew Austin to New York for its investor day, where the communications company laid out a plan to make data center, automotive, and IoT two-thirds of its busines

Advanced Packaging, TSMC CoWoS, Intel EMIB

New episode: Advanced packaging for AI chips, from wire bonds to TSMC CoWOS and Intel EMIB. Packaging is no longer an afterthought. It is the chip, and Intel's EMIB

Computex Mania 2026: Optics and Power

Austin and Vik discuss their recent experience at Computex, where they met for the first time in person after six months of podcasting together. They share insights abo

Huawei's Tau Scaling Law: Is the "EUV Killer" Real?

Huawei dropped a paper claiming 1.4nm-class performance without EUV, and the internet immediately declared ASML dead and US export controls useless. Austin and Vik record

Lithography Masterclass

Spend one hour here and you've caught up on the entire arc of semiconductor lithography. Austin and Vik run a masterclass on the technology that decides who gets to

Cerebras IPO

Cerebras IPO is the only thing to talk about this week. 🔥 IPO prices at $185/share. Pops nearly 70% right after. The first wafer-scale chip company to make it public — a

Gimlet's Cross-Vendor Inference Cloud

Gimlet Labs runs an inference cloud built on heterogeneous silicon. Their software traces a PyTorch workload, segments it into its component parts, and schedules each pie