The Hardware Podcast with Fexingo: Chips, Devices, and Electronics Engineering Conversations

In this episode of The Hardware Podcast, Lucas and Luna dive into the emerging trend of deep trench capacitors (DTCs) integrated directly into silicon chips. They explore how companies like Intel and TSMC are embedding these passive components to combat voltage droop, reduce noise, and improve power delivery in high-performance processors. With specific numbers on capacitance density and performan...

In this episode of The Hardware Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore the emerging trend of integrating antennas directly onto silicon chips to replace traditional wired interconnects for short-range data communication. They discuss a 2025 paper from Intel Labs demonstrating a 60GHz on-chip antenna array achieving 40 Gbps data rates over a few millimeters, the engineering challenges of antenna efficienc...

In this episode of The Hardware Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore the emerging field of cryogenic chip cooling—not for quantum computers, but for classical semiconductor logic. They break down how Intel and others are experimenting with sub-100 Kelvin operation to slash leakage current and boost transistor switching speed. The discussion centers on a 2025 ISSCC paper from Intel Labs showing a 40% fr...

In this episode of The Hardware Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore the technique of applying mechanical strain to silicon transistors to improve electron mobility, a method chipmakers like Intel and TSMC have used since the 90nm node. Lucas explains the physics behind strained silicon, how uniaxial strain differs from biaxial, and why it's still relevant at 3nm and beyond. Luna brings in a specific e...

Episode 75 of The Hardware Podcast with Fexingo. Lucas and Luna dive into the chiplet revolution—why the industry is moving from monolithic chips to modular, multi-die packages. They break down AMD's successful chiplet strategy with EPYC and Ryzen processors, compare it with Intel's delayed Ponte Vecchio GPU, and explore the technical challenges of die-to-die interconnects like Universal Chiplet I...

In this episode of The Hardware Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore the quiet revolution in power delivery: moving voltage regulators from the motherboard directly onto the chip. They dissect why Intel's FIVR technology, first introduced in Haswell, is now being reimagined at advanced nodes for both CPUs and GPUs. The hosts explain how on-chip regulators reduce power loss, improve transient response,...

This episode explores the shift from research-lab silicon photonics to commercial foundry production. Lucas and Luna discuss how TSMC, Intel, and GlobalFoundries are integrating optical components alongside traditional CMOS, the role of the 300-millimeter wafer platform, and what this means for datacenter interconnect bandwidth. The conversation focuses on the practical engineering challenges—wave...

In this episode of The Hardware Podcast, Lucas and Luna dive into the emerging world of photonic computing cores. They explore how companies like Lightmatter and Ayar Labs are replacing traditional electronic interconnects with silicon photonics to move data at the speed of light. The discussion centers on a key milestone: Lightmatter's Envise chip, which integrates photonic cores for AI inference...

In this episode of The Hardware Podcast with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore how chipmakers are turning to additive manufacturing — essentially 3D printing — to build the microscopic copper interconnects that connect transistors on a die. We focus on a specific breakthrough from a company called Applied Nanotools, which demonstrated a process called 'superconformal electrodeposition' that deposits...

For decades, silicon has been the workhorse of chipmaking, but it's hitting a thermal wall. In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore why chip designers are now experimenting with diamond substrates — a material that conducts heat five times better than copper. They look at how companies like Akashic Systems and Stanford researchers are fabricating thin-film diamond layers directly on CMOS wafers, p...

Lucas and Luna explore the race to put high-speed optical modems directly on silicon chips, moving data with light instead of electricity. They examine the bottleneck at the chip's edge, where electrical I/O can't keep up with internal compute speeds. The conversation focuses on a specific breakthrough: Intel's integrated hybrid silicon laser, announced in 2024, which combines an indium phosphide...

On this episode of The Hardware Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore the quiet but crucial shift toward dedicated analog front-end (AFE) chips in modern electronics. With wireless sensor nodes expected to reach 75 billion by 2030, designers are separating analog conditioning from digital processing to cut noise and save power. Lucas breaks down how ADI's AD5941 bio-impedance AFE is being used in wearab...

Episode 67 of The Hardware Podcast explores why chip designers are turning to embedded optical interconnects to solve data movement bottlenecks. Lucas and Luna unpack the physics limits of copper wiring, the 'optical transceiver in package' approach pioneered by companies like Ayar Labs and Intel, and what it means for performance and power. They discuss the recent prototype from a major foundry s...

Episode 66 of The Hardware Podcast. Lucas and Luna explore glass substrates for chip packaging — a material shift that could reshape how processors handle bandwidth, heat, and interconnect density. They discuss why Intel and Samsung are investing in glass core substrates, the manufacturing challenges at scale, and how this technology could enable faster AI accelerators and data-center chips. Speci...

In this episode of The Hardware Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore how advanced chip designers are tackling electromigration — the slow migration of metal atoms that can cause chip failure — at the three-nanometer node. They dive into the physics behind copper interconnects, why cobalt and ruthenium are replacing copper in critical layers, and how TSMC and Intel are using barrier engineering and nove...

Episode 64 of The Hardware Podcast explores how chip designers are embedding dedicated hardware firewalls directly into networking silicon to protect data in motion. Lucas and Luna break down the architecture behind in-line security engines that inspect packets at line rate without sacrificing throughput. They discuss a real deployment at a major cloud provider that cut latency by 40 percent compa...

By 2026, the amount of data generated at the edge is overwhelming memory bandwidth and power budgets. Lucas explains how a technique called near-sensor compression is moving data reduction from the CPU to the sensor itself. He walks through a concrete example: a 4K image sensor that outputs 400 megabytes per second, and how a dedicated compression engine can shrink that by 60 percent with no visib...

When chip features shrink to a few nanometers, the alignment between layers becomes one of the hardest problems in manufacturing. In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore the quiet crisis of overlay error — how tiny shifts in lithography masks can destroy entire wafers, and how the industry is solving it with new metrology techniques and machine learning. Featuring the specific example of ASML's la...

Episode 61 of The Hardware Podcast with Fexingo dives into in-memory computing, a paradigm shift that runs computations directly inside memory cells to break the von Neumann bottleneck. Lucas and Luna explore the physics behind analog compute-in-memory using resistive RAM (RRAM) crossbar arrays, and contrast it with digital near-memory processing. They discuss why this matters for AI inference on...

Episode 60 of The Hardware Podcast explores ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM) and hafnium oxide-based ferroelectric FETs as a potential replacement for embedded flash and DRAM in advanced nodes. Lucas explains how ferroelectric materials switch polarization to store data without constant power, and why SkyWater Technology recently licensed a thin-film FeFET process from Ferroelectric Memory Co. for 130nm...

Lucas and Luna dive into the unsung science of thermal management in modern chips. From the IBM z16 mainframe's liquid-cooled design to Apple's M-series unified thermal spreaders, they explore how heat dissipation is becoming the bottleneck in performance scaling. The episode features a detailed breakdown of heat sink design principles, the shift from thermal paste to liquid metal TIMs, and why da...

Chiplets are everywhere now — Apple, AMD, Intel all mix and match dies in a single package. But the glue that holds them together is a mess of proprietary protocols, each with its own licensing and overhead. Lucas and Luna drill into one specific effort to fix that: the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express, or UCIe, standard. They trace its origins back to 2022, when a handful of companies — Int...

Lucas and Luna explore why chip designers are turning back to analog computing for AI inference, with a focus on Mythic's analog in-memory compute chip that achieves 10 TOPS per watt. They explain how analog compute works by representing data as voltage levels instead of digital bits, avoiding the Von Neumann bottleneck. The episode covers the key tradeoffs: lower precision (8-bit equivalent) but...

In this episode of The Hardware Podcast, Lucas and Luna explore the emerging trend of backside power delivery networks—a radical redesign of how chips get their electricity. They break down why traditional frontside power delivery is hitting a wall as transistors shrink below 3 nanometers, and how moving power wires to the back of the silicon frees up space for signal routing and reduces voltage d...

Episode 55 of The Hardware Podcast explores the shift toward embedding dedicated AI accelerator cores into mainstream chips, not just high-end server processors. Lucas and Luna examine Apple's Neural Engine as a case study, tracing its evolution from the A11 Bionic in 2017 to the current M4 architecture, which dedicates 16 cores to on-device machine learning. They discuss why general-purpose CPU a...