Semiconductor Industry
It is tempting to read AI chip trends for 2027 through peak compute alone. For the engineers who design, verify, package and test these parts, the harder limits now sit elsewhere: memory that is short and expensive, packages that are larger than a reticle many times over, links between chips that copper can barely carry, and racks heading towards a megawatt each. This post sets out ten semiconductor trends for 2027, ordered by how directly the…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
November 13, 2026
Special Reports
A eulogy for Jensen Huang’s years at NVIDIA Somewhere there is an old graphics card in a drawer. Its fan has gathered dust. The computer it belonged to is long gone. Whoever bought it probably saved up for it, compared it with a slightly cheaper model and went to bed too late the night they finally got it running. They wanted to play a game. That small, ordinary transaction feels like a good place to begin remembering Jensen Huang’s thirty-th…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
November 13, 2026
Reliability
Bulk ruthenium conducts about four times worse than bulk copper, and bulk molybdenum about three times worse. Both are still serious candidates for the tightest metal layers of future logic. The reason is that a 10 nm wire does not behave like a block of metal, and a copper wire of that width is only about half copper. This post works through the resistivity against line width with a simple published model, shows which inputs decide the answer…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
November 13, 2026
Photonics
When a pluggable transceiver fails, a technician pulls it from the faceplate and fits another. When an optical engine fails inside a co-packaged switch or accelerator, it can take the whole package with it, including a very expensive piece of silicon that was working perfectly. That one difference explains most of what is unusual about testing co-packaged optics (CPO). The industry's answer is the known good optical engine: prove the engin…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
November 12, 2026
Through-Glass Vias
Intel put glass core substrates in the headlines in September 2023 and said complete solutions would reach the market in the second half of this decade. More than three years on, a technical note from the IEEE Electronics Packaging Society, updated in November 2025, still says glass has yet to be commercialised. Both statements can be true, and the gap between them is the subject of this post. Glass solves real problems in large AI packages, b…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
November 12, 2026
SoC Design
Sooner or later, an automotive customer sends a chip team a list of requests: an FMEDA, a safety manual, a dependent failure analysis, and a statement of which ASIL the part can support. ISO 26262 sits behind that list, and it was written for road vehicle systems, not for silicon. A semiconductor team has to work out what the standard means for a block of RTL that has no vehicle attached to it yet. This post goes through what Part 5 and Part 1…
by
Murugavel Ganesan
November 11, 2026
