Ep. 019 - Inside the STEEL Lab: From Package to Transistor (Teardown Lab) | Afzal Ahmad, Andrew Wagner, Jordan Nanos
Episode publishedPodcast: SemiAnalysis WeeklySemiAnalysis Weekly
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Hello,
everyone. Welcome back to Semi Analysis Weekly, episode number 19. We are here with the S. E. L. Team. One of the coolest things actually, I would say definitely the coolest thing that somebody else is doing right now, the Steel Teardown Lab. We're gonna dig into the public launch of Steel. That means an article where we did a teardown of some consumer chips and basically put on display everything that the steel team has to offer. Joining me today, we've got Andrew. How's it going, man? Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
And we've got Afzal. Welcome.
Thank you. Hello.
Awesome, guys. So, I think a lot of the listeners are gonna need some basic intro, so hopefully you can bear with me as we go through this and explain some some things to the general audience. So let's let's start with this. Like, Wags, can you tell me what's the steel team and what is a teardown high level?
Yeah. So what are the teardown? I mean, it's literally what it sounds like, right? We take, in the case of our first article, consumer chip, we take out of the package and we just start breaking it down and looking at what's there. We take it from the box, we get it in all the way down to the transistor and everything in between. Anyone listening understands data center, AI, consumer chips, everything's advancing at the speed of light, right. In some cases, literally. And so there's a lot of competition within the marketplace. Who's in, who's out, what are the advances? What are technical nuan
Awesome. Yeah, it was a great article and we'll definitely dig into it. So, wanna get your take on this. When it comes to teardowns, before steel existed, obviously, people would use the these outputs that steel can produce in order to understand chips. Can you explain a little bit about the motivation of, like, what you use the output from the steel lab to do in order to like understand chips?
Well, there's really two angles you can approach this from. One is from the chip designers themselves and one is like as a competitor. So example, if I am and I want to and I have the tie down of NVIDIA GPU, I can see how they are using the area, how how much cache they're using, how much area is being used for the compute or for the memory or the IO. So that's, one major thing for them. And on the other side, for the chip designers themselves, they get to see what the process node is, for example, before they even start designing. So they can see this chip from Apple, then you can see, this i
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