Hardware-Architecture

• Storage-Class Memory: Intel Optane, 3D XPoint, and the Lessons of a Bold Failure · 2025-08-15

  The technology, the programming model, and the performance characteristics of Intel Optane — and why the most promising memory technology in a generation failed commercially despite delivering exactly what it promised.

• Memory Technologies: DRAM, HBM, GDDR, and the Scaling Wall · 2025-08-10

  Inside the memory hierarchy that feeds the compute engines — DRAM cell physics, HBM stack architecture, GDDR for graphics, the row hammer crisis, and emerging alternatives like FeRAM and MRAM.

• ASIC Design Flow: From RTL to GDSII — Synthesis, STA, and the Tapeout Checklist · 2025-06-22

  A walk through the entire ASIC design flow — logic synthesis with Design Compiler, static timing analysis with PrimeTime, place-and-route with Innovus/ICC2, clock tree synthesis, and the signoff checklist that separates working silicon from a very expensive coaster.

• FPGA Programming: HLS, Verilog, and the Spatial Computing Paradigm · 2025-05-12

  How reconfigurable hardware rewires the boundary between software and silicon — from Verilog's explicit dataflow to high-level synthesis with C++, and why FPGAs are eating the inference and networking world.

• Quantum Computing Architectures: Superconducting Qubits, Trapped Ions, and the NISQ Era · 2025-04-17

  From transmon Hamiltonians to Majorana zero modes — a deep architectural dive into the physical platforms competing to build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer, and why the error correction overhead dominates everything.

• CHERI and Capability Hardware: Memory Safety at the Gate Level · 2025-03-11

  How CHERI Concentrate compression, the load barrier for temporal safety, and the Arm Morello prototype are reshaping what it means to build a secure processor — and why formal verification of capability integrity is the hard part.

• RISC-V: The Open ISA Revolution and the Cambrian Explosion of Processor Design · 2025-02-11

  How a Berkeley research project became the Linux of instruction sets, rewiring the economics of custom silicon from embedded MCUs to vector supercomputers with the RVV extension and the CHERI security story.

• Processing-in-Memory: UPMEM, Samsung HBM-PIM, and the Near-Data Computing Paradigm · 2025-02-10

  How moving compute to where the bits live rewrites the rules of memory-bound computation, from UPMEM's DRAM-scale PIM to Samsung's HBM-PIM and the programming model that still keeps us up at night.