Lauro Rizzatti PDF Solutions Vitals Santa Clara–based PDF Solutions is a semiconductor data, analytics, and connectivity company, founded in 1991. Today, its business rests on three pillars, all feeding a single data layer: The company reports about 350 customers spanning fabs, fabless, OSATs and equipment OEMs, i.e., it sits in the middle and broker data across the … Read more
Ask an engineer where AI performance comes from and you will hear about process nodes, dataflow, HBM stacks and interconnect fabrics. Rarely about the wafer. Yet a Grenoble company that most people outside the industry have never heard of has quietly built its business on a simple idea: if you engineer the right properties into … Read more
Champagne is an unusual opening act for a semiconductor conference. At SEMICON West 2026, October 13 to 15, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, it served a purpose. The toast marked an industry that has already crossed $1 trillion in annual revenue, almost four years ahead of earlier projections. WSTS (World Semiconductor Trade Statistics) … Read more
For decades, semiconductor test floors have operated as high-stakes black boxes. Every test engineer knows the grueling routine: a lot finishes, the STDF (Standard Test Data Format) files finally drop, and someone opens a dense report the next morning, only to discover a drifting parameter, a stuck handler, or a tester that sat idle for … Read more
When a Silicon Valley veteran who once ran Intel’s Data Center and AI Group, and now chairs a French inference-chip challenger, sits down with a tech journalist from Bloomberg, the vantage point is unusual. On the program, Rivera addressed the question hanging over the entire AI trade: can demand and revenue grow fast enough to … Read more
There are two major workloads that make up AI compute: training and inference. Training looks back. It digests a frozen body of past text, images and code, and distills it into weights. Inference looks forward. It takes those weights and, one token at a time, produces something that did not exist a moment ago. Same … Read more
For more than a decade, the AI hardware industry focused mainly on model training, while inference represented a smaller share of overall demand. That balance is changing as trained models are deployed widely in recommendation engines, content-generation systems, transcription and translation services, and autonomous devices. Industry estimates now place inference at most data-center AI workloads. … Read more
PreambleHardware-assisted verification (HAV) platforms, including hardware emulators and FPGA-based prototyping systems, are the two dominant methodologies for validating long workloads on complex System-on-Chip (SoC) designs before tape-out. HAV sits within a broader continuum of verification engines: simulation and formal methods are applied earlier, at the block and sub-system level, while post-silicon validation comes later. Historically, … Read more
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Johann Foucher, founder and CEO of Pollen Metrology, a French company whose journey offers a rare vantage point on how artificial intelligence is reshaping semiconductor manufacturing from the inside out. What makes Pollen Metrology’s story compelling isn’t just the technology itself, but the timing and conviction behind … Read more
When this piece first ran a year ago, VSORA was the quiet outsider, a company with a bold architecture and no Silicon Valley address. One year on, the thesis has held up better than even its author expected. In January 2026, Sandra Rivera, former CEO of Altera and, before that, a two-decade Intel veteran who … Read more