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The semiconductor industry is adopting AI-assisted design tools faster than it is changing the teams that use them. The tools now help with RTL, verification, physical design, power and test, but hiring, job roles, training and performance metrics still reflect how chips were built a decade ago. That gap between 2026 tools and 2015 team structures is where expensive mistakes happen, and closing it is a leadership and organisational design task, …
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Murugavel Ganesan
June 24, 2026
Semiconductor Industry
A chiplet is a small die designed to be combined with other dies in one package so that together they behave like a single large chip. The idea took off because giant monolithic dies at advanced nodes became too costly to yield, and because not every circuit benefits from the newest process. Better die-to-die interconnect and advanced packaging made it practical, AMD proved it commercially with Zen 2 in 2019, and Intel, Apple and NVIDIA followed…
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Murugavel Ganesan
April 02, 2026
Process Technology
Building an automotive chip on a commercial wafer process and then qualifying it to AEC-Q100 is sometimes the only option, but on mature nodes it is usually a false saving. AEC-Q100 shows that sampled parts survived a set of stress tests; it does not make the silicon as robust as a process built for automotive. What you save on wafers you tend to spend again on screening, yield loss, test time and field reliability risk. In the semiconductor w…
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Murugavel Ganesan
December 12, 2025
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. …
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Murugavel Ganesan
November 10, 2025
Opinion
The hidden cost of agentic AI is everything an autonomous agent needs to keep running: always-on inference in data centres, the electricity and water those centres consume, the advanced chips and the fragile supply chain that makes them, and the human workers who label, test and correct the models. Because agents loop through many model calls for every task, their running cost grows with use, not just with training. Autonomy for the user rests o…
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Murugavel Ganesan
November 01, 2025
SerDes
OpenGMSL is Analog Devices' plan to turn its proprietary GMSL (Gigabit Multimedia Serial Link) automotive SerDes into a documented, multi-vendor standard, run by a new non-profit, the OpenGMSL Association. It can succeed if other chipmakers actually ship compatible silicon, if the association's compliance testing proves real interoperability, and if governance is seen as independent of ADI. Its advantage is an enormous installed base; it…
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Murugavel Ganesan
May 14, 2025
SoC Design
A software-defined vehicle (SDV) is a car whose features, behaviour and safety functions are defined mainly by software running on a small number of powerful central computers, rather than by dozens of fixed-function electronic control units. As the industry moves from the Internal Combustion Engine, the heart of the vehicle becomes what this post calls the Internal Compute Engine: the processors, accelerators and networks that run driver assist…
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Murugavel Ganesan
October 15, 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
Opinion
Artificial intelligence (AI) matters in the digital age because it turns the data that digital systems already collect into decisions: what an image shows, which transaction looks like fraud, how a car should brake. It is becoming one of the most significant technologies of our time, touching work, healthcare, finance, transport and public services. Its benefits are large, and so are the challenges, from job displacement to the need for new ru…
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Murugavel Ganesan
February 15, 2023