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Chipstrat

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Fundamentals

Optics Primer, Part 3: Co-Packaged Optics (CPO)
From EML lasers and DSPs to silicon photonics and external CW lasers. How CPO works and the impact on the optical supply chain.
 • Austin Lyons
Optics Primer, Part 2: LRO & LPO
LRO and LPO move signal processing out of the transceiver and into the switch, saving power at the cost of tighter system coupling. An incremental step…
 • Austin Lyons
LiDAR, Explained: How It Works and Why It Matters
Autonomy, 905nm vs 1550nm, ToF vs FMCW, market dynamics, and more.
 • Austin Lyons
Optics Primer, Part 1: Traditional Pluggable Optics
Optical interconnects, pluggable transceivers, optical and electrical engines, DSP overhead, power and latency trade-offs
 • Austin Lyons
SerDes Matters!
What Is SerDes, Why It Matters, Which Companies Have SerDes Chops
 • Austin Lyons
Chiplets and the Future of System Design
How chiplets keep integration scaling alive. Benefits, trade-offs, and the need for open standards.
 • Austin Lyons
The Long Arc of Semiconductor Scaling
The journey from vacuum tubes to transistors, from small ICs to billion-transistor SoCs. Setting the stage for chiplets.
 • Austin Lyons
Robots That See, Part 2: Vision Transformers
Transformer neural nets are quickly making robotics way more useful.
 • Austin Lyons
Robots That See, Part 1: The Evolution of Computer Vision
Computer Vision, ConvNets, MNIST, ImageNet, AlexNet, Yann LeCunn, Fei-Fei Li
 • Austin Lyons
Semiconductor Metrology
Measure What Matters!
 • Austin Lyons
Tokens Per Second Per Watt: A Useful Metric for Edge AI
A systems-level perspective on performance and energy efficiency
 • Austin Lyons
High-Bandwidth Memory
What is HBM and why is it important for Generative AI?
 • Austin Lyons
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