Welcome to “Silicon Co-Design”
Welcome to “Silicon Co-Design”!
My goal with this Substack is for all engineers in the hardware / semiconductor industry to have a working knowledge of domains outside their own. This Substack is primarily written for engineers first, investors second, as a starting point to understand hardware.
I’ve taken a few months off work during a sabbatical to travel to flagship technical conferences (ISSCC, DesignCon, APEC, and ECTC) full of domain-specific experts to bring to you the high quality technical information from sources of truth.
I write from the perspective of better understanding abstraction levels above on-chip mixed signal ICs, having spent the first 10 years of my career in analog design, applications, and validation engineering. I also have some interesting startup experience trying to scale new superconducting computing technologies.
Hardware is the new Bottleneck of AI Datacenters
Many leaders across the industry recognize that hardware is becoming the bottleneck in AI Data Centers. Several prominent leaders note this in their conference keynote speeches, such as Dr. Tien Wu, CEO of Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), the largest OSAT in the world, and Hope Giles, VP Hardware Technologies Program Management, at Apple.
However, many excellent writers write about the software side of AI and very few write about the hardware side. There are a handful of writers that cover this space such as SemiAnalysis, Vikram Sekar, PhotonCap, and Fabian. These writers do an excellent job at covering macro-trends as well as providing fundamental explainers, especially on HBM and Optics, and I encourage you to view their content as well to supplement mine.
There is still a knowledge gap for the type of substance that engineers who work on these complex systems want, especially in mixed-signal IC design. I aim to provide that substance with high level mental models while stripping away complexity that does not need to be initially understood by non-experts.
My Website Arrangement: Topics Headers at the Top
When you visit my website, you’ll see all of my posts nearly organized under six distinct headers:
I also highly encourage you to check out the content in the business library. Many highly technical engineers don’t have a good starting point when moving into business or management oriented roles. Many of these books are what I believe to be the gold standard books for understanding the business aspects of technical organizations. I encourage you to browse this section and pick up a book or two to dive in further.
Paid Subscriber Benefits
There is a vast amount of architectural complexity in this substack. Architects need to first learn about these domains first in isolation to intuitively make tradeoffs among them. As such, most of my in-depth posts that were originally free now have paywalls installed halfway through them.
Before each paywall, I link adjacent posts related to the post you just read from the image. The main benefit is that this exposes you to material adjacent to the domain you read about.
If you want to get ahead of the curve, a paid subscription will allow you to access full parts of each post in their entirely enabling an architecture point-of-view. This subscription is fully expensible under corporate training budgets since gives employees valuable system insight to understand the system they are in to communicate more effectively.
Here is how the subscription will work:
Currently my rate is $15 per month or $150 per year.
I will keep this rate for the first 50 paid subscribers with about 25 slots already taken.
After that I will increase this rate to $30 per month or $300 per year.
I will offer a special discount (20% so $12 per month) for university students with a valid .edu email for 1 year to make more informed decisions about what they would like to specialize in.
Additionally, I will offer a 20% discount for group subscriptions for managers to give this Substack to members of their team.
If you really like what I am doing and want to help me offset conference expenses, I also offer a founders tier to support this publication as well.
In my opinion, it is better to learn this material now for your own career benefit and to communicate effectively with technical teams early on, rather than wait for a late stage integration crisis to force this type of thinking.
Referral Bonus - Get a Free One Month Subscription by Sharing this Knowledge with Others
If you gained valuable insight from these posts and feel others can benefit from this, consider referring friends and/or sharing this Substack.
1. Share Silicon Co-Design. When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you’ll get credit for any new subscribers. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.
2. Earn benefits. When more friends use your referral link to subscribe (free or paid), you’ll get a 1 month comp for 5 referrals, then another free month at 15 and 25 referrals.
This way, others can understand the tradeoffs in YOUR domain as well.
Conclusion
This writing process has been quite a challenging journey and I learned a lot of new material myself throughout the writing process.
Thank you for being a subscriber, and I hope you learn a lot as well.
-Chad Wallace
