Nutty | Substack
Nutty
Analog IC Design Engineer in Silicon Valley. Writing about circuits, semiconductors & industry.
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6.3K+ subscribers • #18 Rising in Technology
The More Anthropic Buys Micron HBM, the Faster Optical Memory Pooling Arrives
Everyone bet on AI going optical by buying the laser names, and it worked. Plenty of them more than doubled this year, and NVIDIA poured serious money in too.
But there's another spot worth watching, one layer deeper: the foundries that actually fabricate the chips handling the light. And something unusual happened there. Before the fabs …
Everyone Saw a Laser Shortage. The Money Went to the Foundries First.
SPHBM4 (Standard Package HBM4) tends to get read as faster memory because of the "HBM" in the name, but the real weight sits on the "Standard Package" half: it's about mounting memory onto a cheap standard substrate instead of an expensive silicon interposer, which makes it a standard that addresses packaging, not memory performance.