Breakfast Bytes Blogs

It's great that you're here. That means you read Breakfast Bytes, at least sometimes. But I am a generalist. There are lots of areas of the semiconductor ecosystem that I only cover superficially or don't cover at all. So who else should you read? Well, let me tell you who I read regularly.

Fabricated Knowledge

This is a Substack written by Doug. His name shows as Doug (mule) but @mule is the name he uses on Twitter so I don't think it is actually his last name. I ran into him at Semicon West, and he gave me a free subscription (normally $25/month), so I'm not sure quite how much you get on the free subscription level. His background is in finance, and much of what he writes is for that audience, analyzing financial results of the usual suspects in our industry. But he digs deeper into technology too, to get at the financial implications. For example, here is his post CXL: Protocol for Heterogenous Datacenters.

SemiAnalysis

SemiAnalysis is in transition from its own website to a substack. It is written by Dylan Patel. It is also focused on the analysis of the finance industry, but also digs into technical issues and their implications, and sometimes politics too. A post well worth reading is The Dark Side Of The Semiconductor Design Renaissance – Fixed Costs Soaring Due To Photomask Sets, Verification, and Validation to get a flavor of how he covers the industry.

Scotten Jones

When I worked at SemiWiki, one of my co-bloggers was Scotten Jones. I usually meet him at least once a year since both of us attend IEDM in San Francisco each December. I've also met him at ITF (imec Technology Forum) in Belgium. His day job is running IC Knowledge. Scotten is the go-to person for anything to do with fabrication costs, for existing fabs (people wanting to know the costs of their competitors), future fabs (people wanting to know their wafer costs from a new fab). His models are built up from very detailed analysis of things like transistor size or the minimum metal pitch. He doesn't have his own blog, but he occasionally writes posts on SemiWiki. Of course, I recommend SemiWiki in general, but here are just Scotten's posts.

To get a flavor of his coverage, try Imec Buried Power Rail and Backside Power Delivery at VLSI. Here's a bit from the middle:

Digits to Dollars

Digits to Dollars has as its subtitle "Technology Finance & Strategy with Real World Insight". It is written by Jay Goldberg. To give you a flavor, try Can There Be a Long Tail of Semis?

Semiconductor Packaging News

Despite the name, Semiconductor Packaging News and its daily newsletter cover a lot more than packaging. I suggest subscribing to their daily newsletter (I do). Click on "subscribe" in the top right corner of the website.

Munro Live

Munro Associates covers everything to do with the manufacture of electric vehicles. A lot of what they do are teardowns, a lot of which they show on their YouTube channel. Their primary business is doing long reports that they sell for $90,000 to automotive companies. Probably, you are not going to buy that. Sometimes they sell summary versions of the report to the general public for $5, which maybe you might. And a summary report does not mean two pages, it is over 100 pages. The summaries are actually prepared as a teaser for potential clients of the full report, which can be over 500 to thousands of pages. These sound expensive but can be cheaper than a company doing its own research. For example, they estimate that to discover the information in their report on electric traction motors would cost over $300,000 just to acquire all the motors, before paying engineers to analyze them.

If you look at any of the YouTube channels (there are a lot!) that cover Tesla, none of them have the money or the expertise to buy a Tesla and tear it apart. Instead, they create videos where more than half the content is Munro Live's videos.

Right now, Munro are stripping down a Texas-built Model Y, which is the one with the big gigacastings and the structural battery pack of new 4680 batteries. They have not yet got as far as exposing more than the edge of one side of the battery pack. See the thumbnail for the video below. The teardown is going a lot slower than they anticipated. To learn more about this, I suggest that you subscribe to their YouTube channel Munro Live. To give you a flavor of it, here is the latest video as I write this, 4680 Battery Pack: What We Found Under the Foam!

Learn More

I suggest you subscribe to at least the free tiers of all the people I wrote about above who have Substacks. Also, if you are interested in automotive, subscribe to Munro Live. I also recommend Asianometry (see my post Asianometry).

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