Semi Doped
The business and technology of semiconductors. Alpha for engineers and investors alike.
Semi Doped
Latest Episodes
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 across — and the core engineering trade-off at each layer: copper vs. opti...
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 unconstrained while indium phosphide (InP) is limited, and how PicoJool can ...
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-bandwidth networks to make storage faster than motherboard DRAM. They dive into KV cach...
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 inflation and price hikes for consumer electronics. They discuss how even premium ...
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 business by FY29. Austin was in the room and asked Cristiano Amon a question on t...
