Amelia's Weekly Fish Fry

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.

My podcast guest this week is Ferric CEO Noah Sturcken. Noah and I discuss how Ferric's innovations—specifically their ferromagnetic materials and on-chip power converters—are addressing the critical power, efficiency, and integration hurdles facing today's AI processors. We also explore how IVRs enable higher instantaneous power delivery, simplify board design, and reshape processor architecture, and where Noah sees Ferric headed in the future.

In this week’s Fish Fry we’re casting our line into one of the most transformative shifts happening in the automotive industry today: the rise of software-defined systems! Nitish Rao from MathWorks and I take a closer look at which vehicle functions are best handled by AI-driven systems, and which still depend on the reliability of traditional control software and how virtual ECUs and digital twins enable simulation and validation before real hardware. We also discuss a question many engineers are asking: can software and AI actually reduce hardware costs?