Daily Update - June 16th, 2026 - PicoJool introduces 200G VCSELs for AI data centers - AMD acquires MEXT to advance memory optimization - TSMC partners with Ibiden, Innolux on glass substrates - Qualcomm in talks to acquire Tenstorrent - TechInsights confirms SMIC N 3 node in Kirin 9030 - Applied Materials launches 3D chip tools semidoped.com/p/daily-update…

Daily Update - June 15th, 2026 - Tensordyne launches Napier - Korean suppliers win Nvidia CPO component orders - TSMC opens European design center in Munich - ByteDance in talks with Iluvatar CoreX - Kioxia pushes embedded storage toward edge AI - CoPoS at a Glance semidoped.com/p/daily-update…

In 1908, Kikunae Ikeda was puzzling over why seaweed stock tastes so deeply savory, isolated the compound responsible and insisted it amounted to a basic taste beyond the textbook four. He patented a way to crystallize its sodium salt into a fine white powder, and coined the term umami to describe it. A partner then brought it to market the following year, and it has been seasoning meals (and feeding a stubborn, scientifically shaky scare) ever since. That partnership grew into a firm that kept mining the same chemistry from new angles. It became one of the world’s largest makers of a tabletop sweetener stitched from two of those amino-acid building blocks and roughly 200 times sweeter than sugar, sold under a name carefully engineered to sound gentle and natural. Then, from a resin left over in its fermentation tanks, it developed a thin, low-loss insulating film that gets laminated in alternating sheets with copper foil, drilled with microscopic holes, and stacked into the rigid organic boards that fan a single die’s thousands of contacts out to the circuit beneath it. This one material now underpins almost the entire high end of that industry. And when supply ran short in 2021, lead times stretched past a year and the squeeze reached as far as car assembly lines. Question: Name the brand Clues and Answer here: semidoped.com/p/quiz-5

TIL: The Calculator Wars And the Revenge That Took a Decade In the early 1970s a thing called the “Calculator Wars” broke out, and it behaved less like ordinary market competition and more like the opening skirmishes of the consumer microchip age. At its peak, it was a frantic, high-stakes game of attrition in which Bowmar, Commodore, Rockwell, and Texas Instruments fought to cram as much logic onto a single grain of silicon as anyone had thought possible. Read more here: semidoped.com/p/the-calculat…

This episode contains videos from the Computex show floor, and me chattering commentary over them about what I'm looking at. If ya'll like this point-and-tell approach, we might do it at more shows we go to. Let us know 👇🏽

The interesting thing about Elon’s empire is not just that it is big. It is that it spans the whole hard tech stack: Chips, PCBs, manufacturing, satellites, space internet, cars, robotics, Neuralink, xAI, and physical AI. Atoms to intelligent bits. Deep tech is cool again.

Semi Doped field trip to Computex 2026! This episode covers Computex and all its AI riches. - Marvell as $1T company and how leather jacket cost Vik thousands of $$$ - Co-packaged optics demo with videos! XPO, MicroLEDs - Power semis, cooling, prefab structures - Intel's keynote and EMIB And some real world stories that we tell. Chapters: (00:00) Cold open: a hundred billion dollar sentence (00:36) Vik and Austin meet in person, finally (07:22) Jensen moves markets on the show floor (09:16) Marvell's keynote and the next $1T company (17:33) Can CPO actually scale? (21:21) XPO: eight pluggables in one connector (24:35) Ayar Labs' fully optical rack, plus microLEDs (28:07) 800 volts everywhere (32:50) Prefab data centers and a freezer full of GPUs (37:41) Intel's Clearwater Forest foundry flex @austinsemis @vikramskr

Daily Update - June 12th, 2026 - TSMC to lift 3nm prices 15% in H2 2026 - Google taps Samsung for next AI chip - Nasdaq 100 adds Nebius, Astera Labs, Rocket Lab, Teradyne - UBS sees semis hitting $2.38T by 2027 - Corning inks multibillion-dollar AWS fiber deal semidoped.com/p/daily-update…

Daily Update - June 11th, 2026 - Colt and Ciena complete quantum-safe transatlantic trial - TSMC pulls in CoPoS packaging to 2H 2028 - China stalls InP export approvals - Oracle slides on AI CapEx plans - Key Data: the memory-tax chart semidoped.com/p/daily-update…

Thank god for TechTechPotato @IanCutress — otherwise we’d be a bunch of?

Be honest, who's your favourite source of semiconductor news and why?

Daily Update - June 10th, 2026 - Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 - TSMC May revenue hits record NT$417B - Apple Private Cloud Compute adds Nvidia GPUs - SpaceX IPO demand is approaching four times oversubscribed - Semi Drama ft SemiAnalysis semidoped.com/p/daily-update… Find us on Substack, Youtube, and LinkedIn.

AI racks went from ~10-20kW in the cloud era to 100-120kW today. Next up: 600kW Rubin Ultra racks, then 1MW racks. That is not a “data center upgrade.” That is a power architecture reset. The AI bottleneck is moving from chips to watts.

Interesting next question!

Multipatterning is like painting a football field with a machine that can only draw every 10 yards. Need 5-yard lines too? Don’t buy a brand-new machine. Draw 10, 20, 30, 40. Then scooch over five yards and draw 5, 15, 25, 35. Twice the steps. Same machine. Smaller pitch. That’s semis, baby. Semi Doped (@semidoped) is Austin Lyons (@austinsemis) of Chipstrat (@chipstrat) and Vikram Sekar (@vikramskr) of Vik’s Newsletter.

Daily Update - June 09th, 2026 - Alphabet contracts Intel to fabricate three million chips - Marvell joins S&P 500, Astera Labs flagged as candidate - SpaceX unveils TeraFab plan, Nvidia-powered AI1 satellites - Intel 18A video semidoped.com/p/daily-update… Find us on Substack, Youtube, and LinkedIn.

DSP is the tau killer. You wait for the bits. Then the parity bits. Then the DSP asks: are these right? No? Cool, time to burn power and latency fixing them. AI clusters do not want that tax. Semi Doped (@semidoped) is Austin Lyons (@austinsemis) of Chipstrat (@chipstrat) and Vikram Sekar (@vikramskr) of Vik’s Newsletter. Find us on Substack, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Daily Update - June 08th, 2026 - Chip slump erases $1.3 trillion in value - Nvidia, SK Hynix Sign Multi-Year Memory Pact - The SoCAMM Rubin Scare - The Rubin Ultra NPO Shift - Startup news semidoped.com/p/daily-update… Find us on Substack, Youtube, and LinkedIn.

Quiz #4 In August 1968, a tiny team began working out of a leased facility at 365 Middlefield Road in Mountain View, California. They were forced to cram into a single shared conference room because the building’s previous tenant, the chemical giant Union Carbide, was still lazily packing its bags to leave. This tiny startup was led by two legendary scientists and their hyper-disciplined hire (universally celebrated in everyday tech lore as “Employee Number One”), who in strict legal and payroll terms was actually employee number three behind the co-founders. They wanted to build semiconductor memory chips to kill off the slow, hand-wired magnetic cores dominating the tech industry. Their early backer, Arthur Rock, had so much faith in the founders’ reputations that he famously raised the first tranche of their $2.5 million in under two days — with no formal business plan in hand, just a page-and-a-half flyer. However, the team hit an immediate branding crisis. Their initial instinct was to simply name the enterprise after the surnames of its two iconic co-founders. But during their very first strategy meeting, they noticed a fatal phonetic flaw. Because of the specific combination of their last names, saying the company name out loud created a terrible homophone. To anyone working in electronics, their corporate identity sounded exactly like an announcement for an increase in unwanted signal interference - the exact type of chaotic, data-ruining disturbance that hardware engineers spend their entire lives trying to eliminate. They quickly abandoned it. After hiding under the sterile placeholder NM Electronics for a few weeks, they eventually settled on a slick portmanteau. In another twist of irony, they discovered the name was already legally trademarked by a Midwestern hotel chain, forcing the founders to shell out $15,000 just to buy the rights to their own identity. Question: By working out the phonetic disaster that the founders narrowly avoided, name this computing giant whose first shipped product was actually a tiny 64-bit memory chip. Guess in the comments! Find clues and the answers here: semidoped.com/p/quiz-4

TIL: The Man Who Invented the Future, Then Starved to Death in It The story of Oleg Losev, LEDs, and a lost manuscript describing a new three-electrode semiconductor device Read it here: semidoped.com/p/til-the-man-… @Semidoped is @AustinLyons from (@Chipstrat) and @Vikramskr from Vik’sNewsletter. Find us on YouTube, Substack, and LinkedIn.