The Hot Take: We'll see where glass takes us, it's an interesting change for sure.
Intel Foundry is leading the race towards Glass Substrates with its Rio Rancho facility, aiming to become the world's first to initiate mass production. Glass Substrates Are The Future of Semiconductors & Intel Foundry is Well on Its Way To Become The First To Initiate Mass Production Glass Core substratesĀ have been gaining interest, as they have several benefits over traditional organic substrate solutions. The current substrates are also facing shortages due to the AI supercycle, leading one of the biggest substrate suppliers,Ā Ajinomoto,ā¦
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The Hot Take: We are going to need all the fabs we can get here.
ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said on Wednesday that he has spoken directly with Elon Musk about the TeraFab semiconductor project.
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The Hot Take: USA domestic manufacturing is taking off, TSMC announcing huge expansions in Arizona. Intel getting that Federal injection is definitely keeping them alive and making them relevant again. Probably also why Nvidia dumped money into Intel too to make sure there is choice states side.
TSMC is turning into a victim of its own success as the world's preferred chip foundry, leaving its heretofore prized customers such as Apple in a bind of sorts as they suddenly find themselves crowded out by AI hyperscalers. In its frustration, Apple is now reportedly exploring the possibility of dividing up its silicon load between Samsung, Intel, and TSMC rather than remaining largely TSMC-exclusive. Apple is looking for contingencies by tentatively probing Intel and Samsung as additional vectors for manufacturing its custom chips Accordingā¦
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The Hot Take: Better with less change seems to be a win!
Intel is preparing to present a refined version of its 18A process technology at the VLSI 2026 Symposium, introducing the 18A-P node as an optimized variant focused on improving power and performance characteristics without altering transistor density.
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The Hot Take: Intel winning all this business just means the domestic creation of products has accelerated to me. Only way they're going to get US Government Contracts or be able to sell in the US Borders. Prime example the router ban they just enacted.
Intel continues to see increased confidence for its upcoming Foundry technologies, such as 18A-P, 14A, and EMIB. Apple & Google Will Reportedly Leverage Intel Foundry 18A-P & EMIB Technologies, 14A Customers Also Lining Up. The Agentic AI and Inferencing boom has led to a significant surge in CPU demand. This has led major semiconductor companies such as TSMC to face severe supply constraints, all the while going on a large-scale expansion spree to meet demand. At the same time, Intel has been driving revenue up by selling off salvagedā¦
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The Hot Take: Will be interesting to see where this goes. I'm wondering what type of cooling/heating this will bring using this medium over what it's replacing.
Amkor says that Glass Substrates, a packaging technology replacement for CoWoS spearheaded by Intel, is set for commercialization within 3 years. Intel-Partner, Amkor, Says Glass Substrates Will See First Commercialization Within Three Years Advanced Packaging is key to any major foundry business as chips are getting more and more complex to meet growing compute and memory demands. TSMC is the single-most important advanced packaging provider in the world thanks to its CoWoS 2.5D technology. Current chip requirements involve integration of HBMā¦
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By ckasprzak | TkOut | April 29, 2026 |
Hardware
The Hot Take: I support this, the soldering and making everything toss away electronics is maddening.
"California, Colorado, Minnesota, New York, Connecticut, Oregon and Washington have all passed comprehensive right-to-repair regulations," reports CNBC, "covering everything from consumer electronics and farm equipment to wheelchairs and automobiles."
And the consumer movement "continues to gain political momentum" across America...
As of this year, advocates are tracking 57 right-to-repair bills across 22 states. In Maine, the state senate just advanced a bill that would bring the right to repair to electronics in theā¦
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The Hot Take: I'm wondering if they're holding out to see if China catches up to ASML's equipment as I know they are dumping boat loads of money to try and catch up to ASML's monopoly.
ASML has launched its 0.55 High Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet (High-NA EUV) in an effort to extend Moore's Law. The market had originally expected TSMC to adopt it first, but the company has held back. TSMC Senior Vice President of Global Business Kevin Zhang stated at the North America Technology Symposium that there are currently no plans to introduce High-NA EUV before 2029, mainly because "it's too expensive!" This decision also reflects how TSMC is shifting competition focus from equipment to process integration and costā¦
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The Hot Take: Great news as we need healthy competition for x86 in a world being crowded by ARM SoC chips. We'll see soon which architecture wins out but we still have RISC-V around the corner, where intel is a board member of that ISA. I feel this limiting ram on devices might be to push in ARM/RISC into acceptance...
Demand for Intel's products exceed expectations and supply, but Intel is still bleeding money.
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By ckasprzak | TkOut | April 23, 2026 |
Hardware
The Hot Take: Cool, I mean if it makes sense I'm all for it.
Shortly after their discovery, carbon nanotubes seemed to be a material wonder. There were metallic and semiconducting forms; they were tiny and incredibly light; and they could only be broken by tearing apart chemical bonds. The ideas for using them seemed endless.
But then the reality of working with them set in. It was hard to get a pure population of metallic or semiconducting forms. Synthesis techniques tended to produce a tangle of mostly short nanotubes; those that extended for more than a couple of centimeters remain rare. And whileā¦
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