Semi Doped
The business and technology of semiconductors. Alpha for engineers and investors alike.
Episodes
38 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...
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 challenges TSMC's CoWOS.Three CoWOS flavors: ...
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 about the massive show, the people they connected with, and the excitin...
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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 recorded one day after Memorial Day to unpack what Huawei actually announced at ...
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 make leading-edge chips, and why so few companies can afford to.The thre...
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 — after a 40-year curse killed every prior attempt.A water-cooler...
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 piece onto the best-suited hardware — connecting chips from different vendors...
Power as the Next Physics Wall for AI
What's common to optics and power that ruins everything in the era of AI?Resistance.The same physics that drove interconnects to optics is now driving low-voltage power delivery up to 800V. Austin Lyons (Chipstrat) and Vik Sekar (...
CapEx is just Memory Tax Now, Deepseek V4 NAND impact
The hyperscaler memory tax quarter.More CapEx? Pssh. We knew flops needed scaling.But $25B at Microsoft alone just to pay higher component prices? A memory tax. That's the news.NAND? Sold out. HBM? Sold out....
Masterclass on Google's TPU v8 Networking
Google's Cloud Next 2026 keynote? Fire. 🔥The TPU is now two chips instead of one — 8t for training, 8i for inference — but more interestingly, it's two scale-up networking topologies too.Austin Lyons (
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Meta VP Matt Steiner on Ads Infra, GPUs, MTIA, and LLM-Written Kernels
Matt Steiner, VP of Monetization Infrastructure, Ranking & AI Foundations at Meta, walks through how Meta's ad system actually works, and why the infrastructure behind it differs from what you'd build for LLMs.We cover Andromeda (re...
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Credo + Dust Photonics, XPO, Nuvacore
Austin and Vik discuss Credo's acquisition of Dust Photonics, XPO as the new standard for scale-out (maybe instead of CPO?) and some thoughts about Nuvacore entering the CPU scene for agentic AI.Gavin Baker's tweet: https://x.com/GavinS...
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Is Intel Finally Back with a $300B market cap? OpenClaw can Dream?
In this episode, Austin and Vik discuss if Intel is finally back with CPU partnerships with Google, and heterogeneous inference with SambaNova, while market cap soars above $300B. Vik tries to get his OpenClaw instance to dream every night....
Reiner Pope (MatX): Designing AI Chips From First Principles for LLMs
Reiner Pope is the co-founder and CEO of MatX, the startup building chips designed from first principles for LLMs. Before MatX, Reiner was on the Google Brain team training LLMs, and his co-founder Mike Gunter was on the TPU team. They left Goo...
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$300M for 70K Viewers | Intel x Elon, OpenAI x TBPN, Citrini's Strait of Hormuz Stunt
Intel Foundry just partnered with Elon Musk’s Terafab. What is Terafab anyway, why vertically integrated fabs make sense but the economics don’t (yet!), and what Intel is doing here (hint: no idea).Then: OpenAI acquires TBPN for an estim...
NVIDIA's Marvell Strategy, Is Memory Different This Time?, Intel's Ireland Fab
In this episode, Austin and Vik analyze NVIDIA's $2 billion investment in Marvell NVLink Fusion, exploring its implications for AI infrastructure, interconnect protocols, and the broader chip ecosystem. They also discuss the current memory mark...
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ARM AGI CPU has entered the chat, TurboQuant thrashes memory stocks
In this episode, Austin and Vik analyze recent developments in GloFo patent lawsuits, the impact of TurboQuant on AI inference, and ARM's strategic move into silicon for agentic AI workloads. Read Vik's substack: https://www.viksnewslet...
MicroLEDs Ain’t Dead, Micron Snags Vera Rubin
Austin and Vik break down a packed week in semiconductors, covering GTC, OFC, and Micron earnings. The conversation kicks off with Jensen Huang's bold claim that engineers should spend $250K/year on AI tokens, and whether companies will buy tok...
Quick Takes: Nvidia Keynote at GTC
Vik and Austin unpack the Nvidia GTC keynote with fresh, top-of-mind takes while trying to breakdown key announcements, what matters and what doesn't. They discuss Groq's LPX, optics+copper for scale up, new CPU requirements, CPO for networking...
Meta's Inference Accelerator & Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI)
Austin recaps moderating an agentic AI panel at Synopsys Converge, then gives an in-depth technical breakdown of Meta's MTIA custom silicon. Why they're building it, how chiplets let them ship a new chip every 6 months, and how the roadmap is s...
The Great Optics-Copper Crossroads
This week, Austin and Vik break down the optics vs. copper debate that rocked semis this week. Nvidia dropped $4 billion on Lumentum and Coherent, Credo posted a blowout quarter betting on copper, and then Hock Tan shocked everyone claiming 400...
