Chips, FPGAs & semiconductors
Product design & engineering
897 episodes across 30 shows cover chips, FPGAs & semiconductors. The shows that cover it most are The Amp Hour, The Circuit and EE Times Current. The most recent, from 12 Oct 2026, is “Unpacking Marvell's Analyst Day, OpenAI Revenue Rumors, and the Heterogeneous Rack” from The Circuit.
FPGA and ASIC design, RISC-V, semiconductor companies and fabs, the chip industry.
897 episodes from 30 shows, most relevant and most recent first.
897 episodes
Unpacking Marvell's Analyst Day, OpenAI Revenue Rumors, and the Heterogeneous Rack
Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg analyze Marvell's recent Analyst Day, highlighting its strategic shift from Amazon ASIC share battles to a broader data center infrastructure play involving optical interconnects, switching silicon, and new AI…
Beyond PPA: How Foundation IP Enables Predictable Execution and Lower TCO for AI-Era SoCs
Ravi Todi, Executive Director of Product Management at Synopsys, explains that competitive power, performance, and area (PPA) are no longer sufficient for AI-era SoCs, as design complexity and execution risk at advanced nodes require a…
Ep 191: Agents Gone Wild: Broadcom’s ASICs and the AI Frontier
Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg discuss Broadcom's recent earnings, highlighting the shift in custom ASIC customers from Google to Anthropic and OpenAI, and the increasing complexity of modeling mixed-chip programs involving competitors like…
Inside a Multi-$Billion IP Engine Driving IC and EDA Innovations
John Koeter, Senior Vice President of IP at Synopsys, discusses the evolution of semiconductor intellectual property, the shift to multi-die chiplet architectures, and the transformative role of AI in chip design. He details Synopsys'…
EP 190: NVIDIA and Marvell Earnings, Hot Chips Hot Takes
Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg analyze NVIDIA’s earnings, highlighting a 70% revenue growth guide driven by supply constraints and TSMC capacity, while noting margin pressure from rising memory and component costs. They discuss Marvell’s…
Chip Design for Fun (and Waffles) with Julia Desmazes
Julia Desmazes, a CPU and RTL designer, discusses her experience building custom ASICs for fun through the Tiny Tape Out program, including a recent 'two weeks until tape out' challenge. She explains the open-source silicon stack…
When AI Gets a Body: Physical AI, Humanoids and the Future of Silicon
Hezi Saar, Executive Director of Product Marketing at Synopsys, discusses the rise of Physical AI, focusing on the semiconductor demands of humanoid robots and autonomous systems. He explains the shift from cloud-only AI to hybrid…
Fixing AI’s Bottlenecks: Memory, Scale, and Sparsity
A panel of neuromorphic engineering experts, including Dr. Damien Querlioz, Dr. Julian Büchel, Professor Tamalika Banerjee, Dr. Maxence Ernoult, and Professor Steve Furber, discusses the bottlenecks in AI hardware at the Atoms to Bits…
How FPGAs become the gatekeepers of Physical AI Security
Eric Sivertson, VP of Security Business at Lattice Semiconductor, explains how FPGAs provide deterministic guardrails for physical AI and robotics, addressing the shift from traditional IT risk to real-world safety risks. He details how…
Building wafer.space with Tim Ansell
Tim Ansell, founder of wafer.space, discusses his new Singapore-based service that provides access to GlobalFoundries' GF180 MCU process for open-source silicon design, following the collapse of eFabless. He explains how wafer.space aims…
EP 185: AMD Advancing AI, Intel Earnings and WFE Demand
Hosts Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg analyze AMD's Advancing AI Day, focusing on CEO Lisa Su's Helios rack-scale architecture, the strategic partnership with Anthropic, and the competitive dynamics against Nvidia in inference workloads. They…
Can the Nvidia Monopoly on AI Chips Be Broken?
Sally Ward-Foxton of EE Times discusses the AI chip market with hosts Dr. Sunny Bains and Dr. Giulia D’Angelo, analyzing the dominance of Nvidia and the potential for neuromorphic and specialized inference chips to break its monopoly. The…
Ep 184: Earnings TSMC/ASML/AEHR, State of AI Semis
Hosts Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg analyze recent earnings from TSMC, ASML, and AEHR, discussing how AI-driven demand is reshaping semiconductor manufacturing. They detail TSMC's increased CapEx for advanced packaging, ASML's expansion of…
Inside Google’s massive AI capex (live)
Amin Vahdat, Google’s chief technologist for AI infrastructure, explains how Google is shifting from training to inference, enabling smaller, distributed data centers and lowering reliability requirements to double compute capacity. He…
EP 164: ARM, ARM Earning, Agentic CPU Inflections, A World of Constraints
Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg discuss the semiconductor industry's 'agentic CPU' surge, driven by the need to execute AI-generated code, which is causing massive demand for high-core-count CPUs from ARM and AMD. They analyze the 'ultimate…
Advanced Packaging & Chiplet Design with Chipletz
Stephen Newberry, Victor Kronberg, and Ching-Ping Wong from Chipletz, a fabless advanced packaging company, discuss their technical paper presented at DesignCon on the wallstrip transmission line. They explain how this novel die-to-die…
Automated Multiphysics for 3D IC Success
Chevanoki and John Ferguson from Siemens EDA discuss the challenges of automated multiphysics analysis for 3D IC design, specifically how power, heat, and stress interact in stacked heterogeneous architectures. They explain the shift from…
The State of Multi-Die: Insights and Customer Requirements
Shaker Kapur, Executive Director of Productline Management for the Synopsys EDA Group, discusses the industry shift toward multi-die design driven by the strategic collaboration between OpenAI and AMD. He explains how this partnership…
AI Disruption: DeepSeek and Cerebras
Andy Hock and James Wang of Cerebras discuss how their wafer-scale silicon executes open-weight models like DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B faster than any number of GPUs, achieving 57x speedup by keeping all 44GB of model weights in on-chip…
Silicon Revolution with Matt Venn
Matt Venn, founder of Tiny Tapeout and Zero to Asic, explains how Tiny Tapeout democratizes chip design by subdividing multi-project wafers (MPWs) from eFabless into affordable, small slots for hobbyists and students. He details the…
EP 163: Breaking the Memory Wall: Micron’s Strategy for the AI Era
Jeremy Werner, SVP and GM of Micron’s Core Data Center Business Unit, explains how AI is shifting the memory industry from a cyclical model to sustainable growth driven by the 'memory wall' in inference. He details Micron's strategy to…
Beyond Automation: Self-Verifying AI Agents for Semiconductor and PCB Design
Amit Gupta, Chief AI Strategy Officer at Siemens EDA, and Tim Costa, VP and GM of Industrial and Computational Engineering at NVIDIA, discuss their collaboration to build self-verifying AI agents for semiconductor and PCB design. They…
Episode 155: SHOW ME THE MONEY! NVIDIA Earnings, and more from the Week!
Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldstein discuss a week of major semiconductor announcements, focusing on AMD's strategic partnership with Meta involving custom Instinct GPUs and equity, and NVIDIA's record-breaking earnings driven by Grace Blackwell…
Heterogeneous Computing with Raja Koduri
Raja Koduri, former chief architect at Intel and AMD, joins Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal to explain the differences between CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs through historical and analogical lenses. Koduri traces the evolution from 3dfx…
EP 151: WFE Boom! Insight from the Clouds. Word of the year - constraints
Hosts Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg analyze the semiconductor industry's current 'constraints' theme, focusing on the structural differences in the Wafer Fab Equipment (WFE) cycle driven by low tool reuse at advanced nodes. They discuss the…
Enter the electric supercycle
Andy Lubershane, head of research at Energy Impact Partners, explains the 'electric supercycle'—a series of interlocking technological flywheels involving solar PV, lithium-ion batteries, EVs, and wide-bandgap power electronics that are…
Will Photonics Loosen the Bottlenecks in Neural Systems?
Dr. Patty Stabile of Eindhoven University of Technology explains her all-optical neuromorphic computing architecture using semiconductor optical amplifiers and wavelength division multiplexing to achieve ultra-low latency processing…
The State of Multi-Die Testing: Essential Insights for Designers
Faisal Goriawala, principal product manager at Synopsys, explains the complexities of multi-die testing for 2.5D and 3DIC packages, distinguishing it from traditional monolithic testing by highlighting the need for pre-bond, mid-bond, and…
Envisioning an Energy Efficient Tech Future
Greg Bailey, President of GreenArrays, discusses the company's approach to designing energy-efficient custom silicon by building from first principles rather than using standard libraries or FPGAs. He explains how GreenArrays creates…
Cooperation and Competition Behind the Scenes in the RISC-V Community
Mark Himelstein, CTO of RISC-V International, explains how the open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) fosters a community of cooperation and competition among chip designers, from startups to multinationals like Qualcomm and…
EP 150: Intel Earnings, Some Intel Growth Theories, X86 v. Arm in Datacenter
Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg analyze Intel's recent earnings, highlighting the disconnect between strong Q4 results and disappointing guidance caused by wafer capacity constraints and yield issues at the 18A node. They discuss the…
IBM Used Mathematics as Compass on Journey to NorthPole
Dr. Dharmendra Modha, IBM’s chief scientist for brain-inspired computing, explains how his team moved from the TrueNorth chip to the NorthPole inference system by prioritizing mathematical axioms over biological replication. He details how…
EP 145: Marvell Analyst Day, Broadcom Earnings, AI Trade Sentiment
Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg analyze Marvell's strategic pivot toward networking and optical interconnects, contrasting Google's proprietary all-optical infrastructure with the broader industry's reliance on copper. They dissect Broadcom's…
Unpacking Semiconductor Packaging: Insights with Jan Vardaman
Jan Vardaman, president and founder of TechSearch International, explains that advanced semiconductor packaging and substrate manufacturing are concentrated in Asia, with high-end operations in Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, while the U.S…
EP 144: AWS Tranium, Marvell Earnings, Intel EMIB!
Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg discuss Amazon's AWS Tranium 3, noting its cluster-scale performance parity with Google TPU but skepticism regarding third-party adoption and its role as a bridge to Tranium 4. They analyze Marvell's earnings…
Oxide's $100M Series B
Oxide Computer Company CEO Steve Tuck and co-founder Bryan Cantrill discuss the company's $100M Series B funding round, highlighting the strategic importance of raising capital to scale manufacturing and engineering teams. They detail…
Trust at Scale: The Next Challenge for AI-Driven Semiconductor Development
Dr. Jim Shiely, Chief of Staff for Calibre Semiconductor R&D at Siemens EDA, discusses the 'trust bottleneck' emerging in semiconductor development as AI becomes embedded in engineering workflows. He explains that while AI accelerates…
Chips at the Edge: Innovation for AI at Edge and Automotive
Hezzy Tzar, Executive Director at Synopsys, discusses the shift of AI workloads from the cloud to the edge, highlighting the critical balance of power, performance, and cost in devices like smartphones and automotive systems. He explains…
Accessible ASICs with Andreas Olofsson
Andreas Olofsson, CEO of ZeroASIC, discusses his journey from founding Parallela and working at DARPA to launching ZeroASIC, a company that builds custom ASICs using chiplets. He explains how the high cost of traditional tape-outs and IP…
History of the Cathode Ray Tube with Kathy Joseph
Kathy Joseph, host of Kathy Loves Physics, joins Dave Jones and Chris Gammell to trace the intricate history of the Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). The conversation details the contributions of early physicists including Philo T. Farnsworth, who…
EP 141: Talking Bubbles, ARM and QCOM Earnings, Memory/Storage Cyclicality
Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg analyze the 'boom-bust-build-out' cycle in the current AI hardware market, arguing that while speculative excesses will correct, they leave behind productive infrastructure like power grids and cheap compute…
How Memristors Will Help Machines Think at Different Timescales
Professor Melika Payvand of the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich explains how memristors enable neuromorphic systems to operate across multiple time scales, addressing the von Neumann bottleneck by storing neuron parameters locally…
EP 140: NVIDIA's $300B chart, CAPEX to the MOON FOREVER!
Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg discuss the semiconductor industry's massive capital expenditure surge, focusing on NVIDIA's projected $300B revenue and the strategic shift of hyperscalers like Amazon and Google toward custom silicon…
State of the Industry: Semiconductor Insiders Discuss the Ambitions and Realities of the CHIPS Act
Rich Simoncic of Microchip Technology, Russ Garcia of Menlo Micro, and Michael Knight of Endries International discuss the CHIPS Act's impact on US semiconductor manufacturing. They highlight the 'valley of death' for R&D, the critical…
EP 139: Intel Earnings, Anthropic TPUs, Challenges for AWS
Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg analyze Intel's recent earnings, highlighting a transitionary phase where strong demand for legacy CPUs masks the slow ramp of 18A process technology and improving foundry customer engagement. They discuss the…
Steve Sanghi - Microchip CEO for 31 Years!
Steve Sanghi, who served as CEO of Microchip Technology for 31 years and is now Executive Chair, explains how he transformed the company from a losing EEPROM maker into a $43 billion microcontroller juggernaut by introducing…
How AI is Changing Every Aspect of EDA
Satish Kumar Balasubrahmanian, who leads product management for custom IC verification at Siemens EDA, explains how the company applies 'Verifiable AI' to accelerate semiconductor design and verification. He details the evolution from…
Designing the AI Factory from the Rack Up
Neeraj Paliwal, Senior Vice President of Silicon IP Product Management at Synopsys, explains why the AI rack has replaced the data center as the fundamental unit of design and economics. He details the shift from 8kW to 130kW+ power…
Predictions 2025
Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal of Oxide Computer Company host a panel with Simon Willison, Steve Klabnik, Steve Tuck, and Mike Cafarella to review past predictions and forecast trends for 2025, 2028, and 2031. The group discusses the…
Navigating the Semiconductor Space for IoT | Rand Technology's Jennifer Strawn | Internet of Things Podcast
Jennifer Strawn, Executive Vice President of Sales and Sourcing at Rand Technology, discusses the complex state of the semiconductor industry and its impact on IoT adoption. She explains how the shift from acute shortages to a surplus of…