Amelia's Weekly Fish Fry

This week, we’re diving into the hidden challenges of AI infrastructure with David Driggers, CEO of Cirrascale. David and I chat about the surprising failure points that traditional data center planning often misses when it comes to large-scale AI deployments, why old assumptions about power, cooling, and networking simply don’t hold up anymore and why the “just add GPUs” strategy can be a recipe for disaster without a true systems-thinking approach. Also this week, I check out a massive breakthrough where physicists are using AI to uncover entirely new laws of nature!

Today, we're diving deep into the future of connectivity, networking, and computing with a look at a revolutionary concept: the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network, or IOWN. My podcast guest is Marco Provolo, Head of IOWN and NTT R&D Global Promotion Office. Marco and I discuss what IOWN is, why the shift from silicon to photonics is so crucial, how NTT is working with international partners to accelerate its adoption, and the most exciting applications we can expect to see in the near future.

In this week’s podcast, we're stepping onto the frontier of battery innovation! My guest is Volexion CEO Joe Adiletta. Joe and I discuss why some battery materials perform great in a lab but fail in real world production, what “designing backward from the factory” means in terms of battery design and the role that manufacturing plays when it comes to the scaling of these kinds of advanced materials. Also this week, I check out a revolutionary memristor that can function at temperatures at 700 degrees Celsius.

This week, I'm excited to welcome Sandra Rivera from VSORA! We dive into a discussion on why AI inference is essential for deployment at scale, specifically focusing on how VSORA’s patented software architecture addresses the "memory wall" by collapsing memory layers. We explore their recent tape-out, which promises approximately 3X the performance at half the power of leading GPUs. We also chat about deployment use cases, the need for low latency and high determinism, future plans for OEM modules and MLPerf benchmarking, and even get a brief look into Sandra’s family llama farm.

In this week’s Fish Fry, I’m excited to welcome back Rob Knoth from Cadence Design Systems! Rob and I dive into a major shift in electronic design automation: the direct integration of artificial intelligence into the design workflow. Rob and I discuss the details of Cadence’s newest innovation - the ChipStack AI Super Agent and Cadence’s overarching strategies of 'design for AI' and 'AI for design. We also explore the core challenges currently facing verification engineers, and examine how the ChipStack AI Super Agent is set to bring predictability and acceleration to your next design process.