Rick Lazansky

Jim Keller, former Intel, AMD, and Tesla engineer, aims to challenge Nvidia's dominance in AI with Tenstorrent's energy-efficient chip design. Tenstorrent's upcoming second-generation AI chip promises superior energy and cost efficiency, presenting a viable alternative to Nvidia's offerings. The innovative design of Tenstorrent's chip features independent decision-making cores, potentially reshaping AI chip technology across diverse applications. #AI #Nvidia #semiconductor #semiconductors #chip #technology #innovation #research #computing Tenstorrent NVIDIA https://lnkd.in/g6a3vAu4

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yieldHUB has semiconductor customers from 13 countries. Customers have, on average, been with us for 5 years. 33% have been with us for at least 5 years and 20% have been with us for more than 10 years. With few exceptions, customers are well funded private companies or well known and publicly quoted companies. Some dropped off over the years, but we grow net customers every year, this year being the second fastest of net customer growth after 2021 (move to cloud tech for big data accelerated during and just after Covid). 50% of payments by all customers are either on time or ahead of time. The payment average is 4 days over payment terms this year so far, 3 days over being the median. But every one of them has paid what they are supposed to, and that's going back 19 years. Semiconductors is a very honourable industry and it's great to be part of it. #customersuccess #payments #customerretention #semiconductors

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In the fiercely competitive semiconductor industry, companies are in a constant battle to retain top talent because in the heart of every good engineer is a passionate problem solver, looking for their next challenge. For them, innovation is the currency of success. Yet companies like Qualcomm, Intel, and Broadcom attract tens of thousands every year by dangling lucrative compensation packages to lure them from competitors. Startup leaders don’t have those resources, so they have to work harder to attract the best talent and then fight like hell to retain them. But some of the most successful startup leaders I know take a different approach. Rather than viewing attraction and retention as a fight, they leverage the inherent qualities of their companies as their advantage. They use their nimbleness, bias toward innovation, and their collaborative cultures like superpowers to attract the right people and those usually end up being the reasons why people stay. Take Richard Fung, CEO of The Six Semiconductor, for example. I had a conversation with Richard and asked him to share his approach to motivating his team. His response was like a mini-masterclass on the topic of talent attraction and retention. Richard emphasized that a culture that encourages engineers to dive deep into the intricacies of their craft, understand the systems they’re building, and connect with the end customer is a successful culture. Richard has been using this approach and it's been paying dividends for The Six Semiconductor so in his honor, here are his six key concepts for creating this type of organization: 1. Foster a Learning Culture: Support ongoing learning and skill development beyond employees' core responsibilities. 2. Prioritize Customer Focus: Embed a customer-centric mindset, and encourage employees to enhance user experiences through their work. 3. Champion Problem-Solving: Empower employees to creatively solve challenges with a focus on customer needs. 4. Promote System-Level Understanding: Encourage employees to grasp the bigger picture of the company's offerings and their role within it. 5. Break Down Silos: Promote collaboration to ensure a comprehensive understanding of projects across teams. 6. Offer Meaningful Challenges: Provide intellectually stimulating projects that make a tangible impact on the company's success. What Richard highlighted is that success goes much deeper than getting great people to join. It's about unleashing the full potential of every individual on your team to drive innovation and help shape the company, and ensuring your team heads in the right direction together. I’m thrilled I got to learn Richard’s perspective and believe other leaders can benefit from hearing it, so I shared the video below. My "challenge question" to other startup leaders is this: what are you doing to foster this type of culture in your organization? Either share below or, feel free to DM me. #semiconductorindustry #startup #leadership

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I have finally delved into this year's "100 Silicon Startups Worth Watching in 2024," recently published by EE Times | Electronic Engineering Times. One insight from Peter Clarke in his preface is the interesting shift in the geographical distribution of these top 100 companies. While there's a slight decline in California and North American representation (is it real?), the most striking changes are the sharp decrease in Chinese companies and the meaningful rise in European entries. Peter attributes the Chinese decline to trade tensions: "#China continues to have high levels of startup activity, but its reduced presence on the Silicon 100 reflects the trade tensions between the U.S. and China. That friction has intensified in recent years and has hit a number of Chinese startups that may have had international aspirations but have been denied access to leading-edge silicon out of foundry TSMC." #Europe, on the other hand, has seen an increase from 23 to 29 startups, with the U.K. leading the charge: "The U.K. has 12 startups on the current list, up from nine startups in version 23. The U.K., with longstanding entrepreneurial bases in Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol, and Edinburgh, has enjoyed strong representation for many years." In my view, this growth is a testament to #Europe's robust academic system, coupled with government support, investments, and incubators like Silicon Catalyst.UK. Israel continues to excel: "Israel has always punched way above its weight by population and continues to do so," with its representation growing slightly from 7 to 8 this year, including NeuReality*, POLYN Technology, NeoLogic*, Speedata.io, Pliops, Chain Reaction Ltd.*, Hailo, .Quantum Machines . (*=new additions to the 2024 list). This list provides a good overview of this dynamic and evolving industry, blending both emerging and more established technologies. It's a must-read for anyone interested in the future of #semiconductor #innovation. For the full list: https://lnkd.in/dgfrNUWX

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We’re one day into DAC, and there have already been announcements that will shape the future of semiconductor design. One startup that I've followed closely for two years shared groundbreaking news that promises to revolutionize chip development and democratize accessibility to chiplets. Baya Systems emerged from stealth mode last week, and CEO and co-founder Sailesh Kumar has done a remarkable job of staying under the radar since founding the company, choosing the perfect moment to unveil updates. Baya revealed not only WHAT they’re working on but also HOW they plan to tackle some of the most pressing challenges faced by SoC architects and designers, and it’s inspiring. The complexity of system design, high costs, and long time-to-market for advanced SoCs often means that a chip can be nearly obsolete by the time it reaches customers. The rapid pace of innovation, especially in AI chips, creates an unforgiving environment where promising startups might only have one shot at success. Baya’s solutions, WeaverPro and WeaveIP, aim to accelerate the design and performance of complex single-die and multi-die SoCs and chiplets. By leveraging a software-centric architecture, Baya simplifies development and accelerates data movement between chiplets and dies. This approach reduces the overall costs associated with advanced AI and CPU acceleration and speeds up time-to-market. WeaverPro and WeaveIP have already received the best kind of acclaim, customer adoption, and Baya announced this week that chiplet technology advocate Tenstorrent will license their WeaveIP fabric to scale their AI and RISC-V chiplet solutions. Chip design icon Jim Keller, who sits on Baya’s Advisory Board, praised the company, saying: “Baya makes great, comprehensive fabric tools that start with top-level architecture and allow us to plan at a detailed level… this, coupled with their visualization tools, enables designers to build next-generation chips, chiplets, and IP.” Adding to their momentum, Baya announced a partnership with Blue Cheetah Analog Design, Inc. yesterday at DAC and introduced a combined chiplet-optimized Network on Chip and PHY interconnect IP solution that simplifies the design and architecture of chiplet-based systems. Sailesh said, “In partnership, we provide system architects with a state-of-the-art platform and powerful tools to create the most innovative and cost-effective chiplet-based products.”   I've mentioned before that enabling development is key to unlocking the door to innovation. For founders without deep pockets or connections to investors, gaining access to better tools and proven intellectual property allows them to move faster and at a lower cost, ultimately helping to bring new designs to life. I’m impressed that Baya, a small yet mighty startup, has created this accessibility and fostered partnerships to help proliferate it. My encouragement to the community - watch them closely. #semiconductorindustry #ai #chiplets

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Sorry for the delay in last week's AI news - just got back from Taiwan and all of its Jensenity! 🔙 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐏𝐚𝐬𝐬: 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐖𝐞𝐞𝐤 Week 42 | June 3-9 JENSENITY at Computex Industry: 🚨AMD unveiled its latest AI processors at the Computex trade show. It also detailed plans to compete with Nvidia (https://lnkd.in/ggvTrCre) 🚨 NVIDIA is said to be prepping AI PC chip with next-gen Arm cores and its Blackwell GPU architecture (https://lnkd.in/gS6Qv2rm?) Financing and M&A: 🚨 Text-to-video platform Pika raises $80M led by Spark Capital with participation from Greycroft, Lightspeed, and others (https://pika.art/blog) 🚨 Twelve Labs, a leader in the multi-modal foundational model space, raised $50m led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and nVentures. The platform is being used by companies in the media & entertainment, advertising and automotive sectors (https://lnkd.in/gvwRkxAr) 🚨 Tektonic AI raises $10m led by Point72 and Madrona to build AI agents to help automate business operations. CEO Nic Surpatanu previously held leadership roles at Tanium, UiPath and Microsoft (https://lnkd.in/gGfxiNW6?). 🚨 Hoop, a next-generation task management platform, raises $5M seed round from Index Ventures 🚨 Greptile raises $4m seed round for code understanding (https://lnkd.in/gDF8MD-C?) 🚨 Cartwheel, a generative 3d animation tool raises $5.6m seed led by Accel and KV Research & Development: 🚨 Qwen2 from Alibaba launched. According to internal released benchmarks, the language model demonstrates superior performance over Llama3-70B and Mixtral 8x22B (https://lnkd.in/gEJi2shn?) 🚨LlamaCare: A Large Medical Language Model for Enhancing Healthcare Knowledge Sharing (https://lnkd.in/g44Q8Pyv?) Other Interesting Resources: 🚨 A good article on robotics in the new wave of LLMs and foundational models. Highly recommend a quick read through for anyone interested in robotics (https://lnkd.in/gn5gbrTR) 🚨Interesting article from John Luttig from Founders Fund on open-source vs. closed-source 🚨Interesting article from Anthropic on Claude's character based on Anthropic's constitutional AI (https://lnkd.in/gK43G7kF?) 🚨Jensen keynote address at Computex: https://lnkd.in/g_eBy-he

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Last week’s DAC showcased exciting announcements from startups that are revolutionizing semiconductor design however these rising stars overshadowed a major update from an industry stalwart - Alphawave Semi - whose news is poised to accelerate the proliferation of chiplets and give rise to a “chiplet marketplace”. Alphawave Semi announced a breakthrough with the tapeout of the industry's first off-the-shelf, multi-protocol I/O connectivity chiplet. This technology can seamlessly integrate into larger SoCs or multi-chip modules, giving designers increased flexibility and more connectivity options for different applications. Reflecting on the Chiplet Summit this past spring, I remember listening to Tony Chan Carusone, Alphawave’s CTO, as he passionately described the significance of chiplets and how Alphawave will foster a more open and democratic design ecosystem. Now, just one quarter later, his team has launched a technology that brings this vision much closer to becoming a reality. Adding to their momentum, Alphawave also announced an expanded partnership with Samsung Foundry to advance the industry's progression toward cutting-edge semiconductor nodes, crucial for the evolution of advanced compute. Samsung’s roadmap in sub-4nm technologies includes FinFET and Gate-All-Around, which are designed to maximize performance in the post-Moore era. Initially targeted for data centers and HPC, these innovations may trickle down to low-cost, AI-enabled edge devices, putting the transformative power of AI into the hands of billions of people worldwide. This news follows Alphawave’s early June announcement of their new partnership with Arm, aimed at unlocking the potential of processors. Alphawave will give Arm access to their robust portfolio of connectivity solutions and silicon IP, which Arm will integrate into their proven portfolio of compute cores. At a time when AI technology is accelerating at breakneck speed, many companies are searching for ways to boost compute performance and address the challenge of moving data between compute and memory more efficiently. While multiple startups offer unique solutions, many customers want battle-tested technology to avoid the risk of investing in solutions that may become obsolete by the time they reach tapeout. Alphawave has developed vital solutions and in doing so, has increased design flexibility, built bridges to new process technologies, and shortened the path to market. “Connectors” are often the catalysts of innovation and Alphwave’s is a testament to that word. I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen from Alphawave and strongly believe they stand at the forefront of an emerging chiplet marketplace. More broadly, I believe their technology serves to democratize design technology and will give emerging companies more options to bring their brilliant ideas to life. #semiconductorindustry #ai #chiplets

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Cadence introduces the Janus NoC for SoC designs.

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The biggest message coming out of this year’s Qualcomm Investor Day is that both the present and the future look bright. How bright? Here are a few of the key takeaways from the event: ✅  We’ve seen strong growth and execution in FY24 ✅ Our recent positive performance is part of a larger trend ✅ We’re well positioned to take advantage of transformative growth opportunities ✅ Revenue growth forecast is strong In short, we are in the process of creating a new Qualcomm that has both a stronger growth profile and lower customer concentration. Important note: since this post has future-looking statements, be sure to check out the Qualcomm Safe Harbor Statement: https://lnkd.in/gW_YSMfE

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This discussion takes a dive deep into the innovations behind #Snapdragon 8 Elite, including its new naming system and significant upgrades to the Oryon CPU, Adreno GPU, and Hexagon NPU. #SnapdragonSummit

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In this episode of the "Quick Chip Series" on the Semiconductor Leadership Podcast, we dive into the remarkable journey of Qualcomm, a powerhouse in the semiconductor industry. On Youtube: https://lnkd.in/de6CY2Jw On Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dppbZi5C Join us as we uncover surprising facts and lesser-known stories about the company's rise to prominence. Did you know Qualcomm's name was almost different? What unexpected innovation sparked its success? How did a single invention revolutionize mobile communication forever? Tune in to discover these intriguing details and more. Subscribe to our YouTube and Spotify channels now to stay updated with our latest episodes and never miss an insight into the semiconductor world!

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Transphorm GaN technology offers the most flexibility in power electronics. This is the result its ease of design, which is one of the cornerstones of our technology. Our SuperGaN FETs compete directly against silicon, silicon carbide, and e-mode GaN whether it’s how the device is driven or the package(s) it’s offered in. Up and above SuperGaN’s flexibility we also enable our SIP (System-In-Package) partners such as Weltrend with GaN FET solutions that compliment our discrete offerings. This results in a solution for all customers no matter their architecture or system needs. #supergan #gan #transphorm #reliability #Weltrend

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PCIe Gen6 + 5nm + MRVL SerDes = Lowest Power for AI!!

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#Startup Tackles #Chiplet Design Complexity 💡 Baya Systems is coming out of stealth mode to take the guess work out of #chiplets 👏 In a briefing with EE Times | Electronic Engineering Times, Nandan Nayampally, Baya’s chief commercial officer, said that with #SoC and chiplet system design, as well as #software development complexity exploding, there is also a growing need to accelerate analysis, design, and deployment of chiplets. He said Baya’s broader agenda is to tackle the data movement bottleneck faced by #AI workloads in #heterogeneous #computing environments, or what Baya said is now “intelligent compute.” Nayampally said a more cohesive system is necessary to reduce data movement, even as more complex #memory hierarchies and processing solutions are coupled together. Chiplets provide a solution but even with standardization, there is a need for tools to support an end-to-end workflow as software development for both them and SoCs gets more complex, he added. A big thank you again to Gary Hilson and EE Times | Electronic Engineering Times for the full article with more background and insights via the link below 💡🙏👇 https://lnkd.in/es_tUdPh #semiconductorindustry #semiconductormanufacturing #semiconductor #technology #innovation #tech #chip #chips #ic #foundry #aiot #it #ml #cloud #datacenter #data #computing #computer #server

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Do you care about $$? If you do, Efficiency of your #AI #workloads is a big deal. Sure you could cut a cake with a sledgehammer - but why? That's a lot of wasted cake. How about a cake knife - perfect solution for the use case? Your #GenAI #usecases should drive your decision on hardware.

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Here we go! #CerebrasSystems tees up for IPO, first off the gate VC-backed AI hardware company, with strong tailwind. Will it open the IPO spigot? That's the $64000 question. Given its improving financials, pioneering wafer-scale chips, and the scarcity factor, among other factors, I believe the odds favor a strong debut, setting the stage for others waiting in the wings. #AI #inferencechips #techipo #venturecapital #privatemarkets #mvpvc #venturebytes $nvda

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OpenAI scales back foundry ambition - At the same time, it is developing AI inference chips, with Broadcom helping with chip design and securing TSMC for manufacturing. OpenAI also plans to diversify chip supply by adding AI chips from AMD. "OpenAI, the fast-growing company behind ChatGPT, has examined a range of options to diversify chip supply and reduce costs. OpenAI considered building everything in-house and raising capital for an expensive plan to build a network of factories known as "foundries" for chip manufacturing. The company has dropped the ambitious foundry plans for now due to the costs and time needed to build a network, and plans instead to focus on in-house chip design efforts, according to sources, who requested anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss private matters. The company's strategy, detailed here for the first time, highlights how the Silicon Valley startup is leveraging industry partnerships and a mix of internal and external approaches to secure chip supply and manage costs like larger rivals Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft. As one of the largest buyers of chips, OpenAI's decision to source from a diverse array of chipmakers while developing its customized chip could have broader tech sector implications." #openai #broadcom #nvidia #amd #chips #design #manufacturing https://lnkd.in/gfp-4t4m

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