After beginning his career with Hewlett-Packard, David Su met a friend for lunch to learn about a new startup called Atheros. He was so excited by the vision to develop world-changing products that Su “went for lunch and never left.” At Atheros, Su had a “front-row seat” developing wireless WAN technology that transitioned from novelty to necessity while Atheros grew from a startup to a billion-dollar behemoth. That little startup was eventually acquired by another company you may have heard of: Qualcomm.

And what led Su to get involved with another startup? Well, lunch, of course. Su and his friends recognized that they could use their design experience to help fix a problem that was partially of their own making: battery consumption for wireless RF products. This was the genesis of Atmosic.

With his decades of design experience, Su admits that he stands on the shoulders of giants when creating new low-power products. The company has recently expanded its RF IC offerings from Bluetooth to Zigbee and Matter over Thread.

When asked how an IC design team knows when they have become either too structured or too unstructured, Su thoughtfully answered that if you never create anything innovative or your chips don’t work, you have probably fallen into one of those two ditches.

You will want to join our host, Daniel Bogdanoff, as he discusses CMOS RF, energy harvesting, and the importance of teams with Su. They touch on many other interesting topics including:

-What he remembers most fondly from his days at Atheros.

-A development failure for one technology that led to success for another.

-The balance of circuits, system, and software design necessary to optimize product performance.

Steve Klinger, Vice President of Product, joins the Moore’s Lobby podcast to discuss how LightMatter is using silicon photonics to improve speed and reduce power consumption in AI data centers. With two previous $1B+ startups under his belt, Klinger knows a thing or two about identifying successful technology solutions to current industry challenges. While compute performance continues to grow rapidly, interconnect has not been able to keep pace. In this episode, Klinger explains how LightMatter’s flagship product, Passage, creates a programmable optical fabric for the efficient interconnect of chiplets and other silicon ICs.

Klinger explains that they are trying to solve the problem of efficiently accessing all of the bandwidth on one chip and sharing it with another chip. If they can improve the interconnect bandwidth density, it will allow performance scaling to continue increasing at the workload level. Klinger emphasizes, “There are data centers with hundreds of millions of dollars of GPUs sitting idle, waiting for the network topology or the interconnects to catch up.”

So, join our host, Daniel Bogdanoff, in this deep dive into silicon photonics with Klinger. In this discussion, they address many fascinating topics, including:

- What makes silicon photonics unique from traditional photonics?

- The common traits shared by Klinger’s previous $1B+ startups.

- The many job openings available at LightMatter.

While leading the system design of new head-word displays for fighter pilots, Tomide Adesanmi was most excited when he got a chance to innovate. However, like most electronics design engineers, he found that the majority of his time was spent searching distributor sites for components, drawing symbols, and working with spreadsheets.

Engineers can also relate to the anxiety he felt, worrying that he might have made a silly mistake by missing a tiny detail on “page 243 of the datasheet” for a microcontroller. So, he quit his job to try to tackle the mundane problems of design using “good software, good algorithms, and electronics.” A few months later, Circuit Mind was founded.

Adesanmi and the Circuit Mind team aim to allow designers to quickly optimize designs with variable weighting on size, power, cost, parts availability, and more. Our Moore’s Lobby audience of electronics engineers will definitely want to listen in as our host, Daniel Bogdanoff, and Adesanmi chat about the possible future of circuit design. You will hear:

-Why it is important that Circuit Mind uses deterministic algorithms as opposed to machine learning.

-Defining the team and roles necessary to build these new tools.

-What company makes the best datasheets?

Contact Circuit Mind to schedule an appointment to learn more, get a demo, receive a quote, or even run a trial of your design on the ACE platform.