Semiconductor Economics
Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft all run their own AI accelerators now, and each publishes figures showing that its chip beats a GPU on cost or efficiency for its own work. It is easy to read that as proof that any large buyer should do the same. Those figures say nothing about what the programme cost or how many chips it took to pay that back. So this post builds the missing sum. It sets a merchant GPU against a custom part using fixed cost…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
November 09, 2026
SoC Design
Post-quantum cryptography usually reaches a chip team as a line in a requirements document: add ML-KEM and ML-DSA. The algorithms have been fixed since NIST published FIPS 203 and FIPS 204 in August 2024, so the open questions are now engineering ones. How many gates, how much SRAM, how many cycles, and what happens to a boot ROM that has to outlive the current signing scheme? Published numbers now answer much of this, although they use differ…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
November 09, 2026
Semiconductor Business
Special report. On 8 November 2026, Nvidia's board said it was opening an independent investigation after news reports that Jensen Huang, the company's founder and chief executive, had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. On the same day, Huang told employees in an email that he had been unfaithful to his wife. According to the New York Times, citing US officials, the woman at the centre of the reports is a Megaspeed execut…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
November 09, 2026
Standard Cells
Put the nFET directly on top of the pFET and the two no longer need separate floor space. On paper that halves a logic cell. An Intel engineer told IEEE Spectrum in 2023 that an inverter at maximum scaling would be 50 percent of the size of an ordinary CMOS one. Complementary FET, or CFET, is now the expected successor to nanosheets, and imec places its first use at the A7 node. The published cell heights tell a more modest story than that 50 …
by
Murugavel Ganesan
November 09, 2026
SiC
Moving a 1 MW rack from 54 V to 800 V cuts the current from about 18,500 A to 1,250 A, and that sum explains why the industry is making the change. It also creates a different kind of fault problem: a low-impedance DC network full of capacitors, with no current zero crossing to help extinguish an arc, and protection that may need to act within microseconds. Most writing on this subject is aimed at facility engineers. This review takes the same…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
November 08, 2026
