Chip design has always depended on unwritten know-how. To bridge tribal knowledge and machine intelligence, engineering culture needs new ways to capture and share the messiness of real design work.| Vik's Newsletter
An in-depth look into the incredible engineering behind the memory used in GPUs for AI accelerators.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Lessons from Boom Supersonic’s engineering culture and what they mean for the future of chip design.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Is substrate-like PCB technology sufficiently ready to replace ABF substrates that are ubiquitous in AI chips today?| www.viksnewsletter.com
Simple ideas to keep your paycheck, grow skills, and enjoy the work again.| www.viksnewsletter.com
A detailed look at transformers, the role of attention, and decoder-only architecture; Learning to count model parameters based on architecture and making guesses on GPT-5 internal construction.| www.viksnewsletter.com
A frank look at why Python and Rust is the future of the hardware programming stack.| Vik's Newsletter
Exploring the technology, trade-offs, and system-level impact of GaN-based power amplifiers that are slowly replacing vacuum tube technology used in satellite communications.| Vik's Newsletter
Why traditional designs cannot power GigaWatt-class datacenters, and what new power system architectures are evolving to meet the demand.| Vik's Newsletter
6 structured questioning frameworks that every engineer needs in their toolkit to navigate complex projects and people.| Vik's Newsletter
A framework for choosing your specialization focus when industry trends and personal interests don’t align.| Vik's Newsletter
If AI is the gold prize, AI-enabled EDA tools are the picks and shovels. Why traditional chip design tools are stuck in the past, and how new AI-first EDA approaches could be critical to the AI boom.| Vik's Newsletter
This is what happens when an esoteric RF circuit is revolutionized and becomes all the rage on X.| Vik's Newsletter
Conference highlights and key takeaways from the 2025 International Microwave Symposium held in San Francisco - the world's premier conference for RF/microwave engineering.| Vik's Newsletter
A field report from the 2025 International Microwave Symposium on RF’s identity crisis.| Vik's Newsletter
With $10 billion dollars of investment required, are we really revolutionizing low-earth orbit (LEO) communication technology or merely adding to space debris?| Vik's Newsletter
If we are really witnessing the birth of a new computing paradigm, then we must prepare ourselves for it.| Vik's Newsletter
What they don’t teach you about thriving in technical organizations, but will define your success.| Vik's Newsletter
Welcome, I hope you'll stay a while.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Almost everything you will ever need to know about semiconductor packaging.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Hearing aid technology is severely lagging, and how neural network processors might help save an aging population from dementia.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Six hard truths about how engineers enter, survive, and often get stuck in the chip industry — and what needs to change.| www.viksnewsletter.com
A step-by-step guide to building, simulating, documenting, and publishing your own IC designs with free and open EDA tools.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Six hard truths about how engineers enter, survive, and often get stuck in the chip industry — and what needs to change.| www.viksnewsletter.com
An exploration of how group IV materials could solve the longstanding problem of silicon’s indirect bandgap, enabling monolithic photonic circuits with competitive laser performance.| www.viksnewsletter.com
A first principles based, continuously evolving, beginners guide to solid state physics and transistor devices.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Your feedback is much appreciated; Curious bits and bobs that inspired, entertained, informed or amused me in 2024.| www.viksnewsletter.com
How IGBT and SiC based traction inverters use power from the lithium ion battery pack to drive the motors using sinusoidal pulse width modulation.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Silicon's Achilles Heel is that its indirect bandgap prevents the implementation of high performance integrated lasers which are much desired in photonic integrated circuits.| www.viksnewsletter.com
FCC gives Starlink a green light; 300 mm silicon photonics from Tower; AI driven chip design; using cellphones as earth sensors; tools to ensure symmetry in analog design.| www.viksnewsletter.com
How arraying antennas creates a narrower beam, choosing antenna elements and array geometry, gain tapering techniques and mutual coupling problems.| www.viksnewsletter.com
A guide to the operating principles, techniques and technology in lidar systems for self driving cars.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Is Tesla’s camera-first self driving approach better than LiDAR? And what autonomous vehicles can learn from superhuman chess engines.| www.viksnewsletter.com
THz radiations finds unique applications in astronomy, medicine and communications, but not without its own distinct challenges.| www.viksnewsletter.com
How a material that acts like glass or metal depending on applied voltage can be used to control the flow of radio frequency signals, and how it compares to silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology.| www.viksnewsletter.com
From PIN diodes, RF MEMS, MESFETs, and HEMTs to RF silicon-on-insulator technology, how the evolution of a circuit as simple as a switch is much more complex than it seems like on the surface.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Understanding the metric that Intel used to abandon a whole technology node.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Understanding how a class of manmade materials can seemingly defy the laws of physics| www.viksnewsletter.com
How to design the perfect chirp signal for distance and velocity measurement.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Understanding the engineering behind how your car can see, adapt and save your life.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Trading off amplifier linearity for better efficiency, why harmonic traps are needed, how push-pull architecture is used for broadband circuits, and the difficulties of its implementation at RF.| www.viksnewsletter.com
How operating in Class AB can overcome cross-over distortion in Class B push-pull amplifiers, getting near 100% efficiency in Class C, and understanding design tradeoffs in Classes A, B, AB, and C.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Basic concepts required to understand classes of operation in power amplifiers.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Design, operation and characteristics of the most linear amplifier class of all.| www.viksnewsletter.com
How antenna beams are electronically steered, pros and cons of different phased array architectures, and Starlink's Dishy McFlatface 📡.| www.viksnewsletter.com
Folding antennas into different shapes to create near infinite radiation patterns.| www.viksnewsletter.com
