Displaying posts in the categoryInnovation
Innovation articles
Video
Five forces will shape technology through 2026: AI staying mainly in the cloud, the move to new transistor structures, HBM4 leading the memory recovery, advanced packaging and photonics tackling heat and bandwidth, and the US and China rivalry splitting the technology supply chain. None of them is a new gadget or app. They come from the places where compute, manufacturing and geopolitics meet. This is an opinion piece written in November 2025. …
by
Murugavel Ganesan
November 10, 2025
Technology
A PDK (Process Design Kit) is the package of models, rules, libraries and verification decks that a foundry supplies for one manufacturing process, so that chip designers can simulate, lay out and check a design before it is built. It is the foundry's process described in a form that EDA tools can read. Every chip that reaches silicon, from a smartphone processor to a power converter, was designed against a PDK, which is why it is often call…
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Murugavel Ganesan
September 16, 2025
Video
DSP is replacing much of the analog signal processing inside high-speed SerDes because, at 100 Gb/s per lane and above with PAM4 signalling, it is easier to digitise the received signal with a fast ADC and equalise it in digital logic than to do the same work with analog circuits. Digital equalisers scale with each new process node, can be made much longer and more flexible, and behave the same across process, voltage and temperature. Analog doe…
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Murugavel Ganesan
March 20, 2025
News
NVIDIA's shares fell about 17% on 27 January 2025 because DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, showed that a frontier-class reasoning model could be built with far less GPU compute than investors had assumed. If top models need fewer chips, the reasoning went, demand for NVIDIA's most expensive accelerators might grow more slowly. This post was written on 28 January 2025, the day after that sell-off, and is kept as a dated commentary, with a shor…
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Murugavel Ganesan
January 28, 2025
TSMC
Gate-all-around (GAA) transistors wrap the gate fully around stacked silicon channels (nanosheets or ribbons), giving better electrostatic control than FinFETs, whose gate covers only three sides of a fin. That control lets the transistor keep scaling with lower leakage and a tunable drive strength. Both Intel 18A (RibbonFET) and TSMC N2 are built on GAA, so the competition between them is decided less by the transistor type and more by yield, b…
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Murugavel Ganesan
January 07, 2025
Technology
Chiplets are smaller dies, each built for one job (compute, I/O, memory, accelerators), that are assembled in one package and behave as a single system-on-chip. Instead of one very large monolithic die, a chiplet SoC splits the design, builds each part on the process node that suits it, tests each die before assembly, and joins them with dense die-to-die links on a silicon interposer, a bridge or a direct 3D bond. The result is better yield and …
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Murugavel Ganesan
January 08, 2024
Tutorials
To use a SWOT analysis when launching a specialised engineering team for product differentiation, assess what the company already does well and badly inside (strengths and weaknesses), then what the market offers and threatens outside (opportunities and threats). Then turn each pairing into a concrete action with an owner, a target and a date, and review it every quarter. The analysis is only useful if it changes what the new team builds first…
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Murugavel Ganesan
October 20, 2023
Verification
Design for Debug (DFD) means building features into a chip, and habits into the design flow, that make failures quick to find after silicon arrives. The ten strategies that do the most to manage debug complexity are: a modular architecture, standard interfaces, careful trace signal selection, abstraction during pre-silicon verification, design reuse, verification metrics to guide debug logic, detailed documentation, regular design reviews, DFT f…
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Murugavel Ganesan
March 19, 2023
Semiconductor Industry
Semiconductors shape this century because almost every product and service that defines it, from smartphones and cloud computing to AI, electric and self-driving cars and connected factories, runs on chips. Each new generation of chips does more computing for less energy and cost, and that steady improvement is what makes new applications practical. The flip side is dependence: when chip supply stalls, whole industries stall with it. Image Co…
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Murugavel Ganesan
February 16, 2023
