Latest Posts from Steven Woo

How AI Is Driving Changes Throughout The Semiconductor Industry

Steven Woo — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 22:35:57 +0000

AI has transformed the semiconductor industry, impacting design, manufacturing and the global economy at large. In 2025, AI adoption “in at least one business function” is at 78% globally. Further, 88% of C-suite executives are keen to speed up AI adoption, moving beyond the discovery phase to build and scale organizational value. As adoption continues to rise, system designers are leaning on chip manufacturers and the greater semiconductor industry to bring forth scalable, secure and energy-efficient solutions. Wider adoption has, in turn, brought about increased demand for more powerful and specialized chips.

Compute Power Challenge: The Race To Accelerate Data Movement

Steven Woo — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 22:34:15 +0000

Exciting developments in AI inference—like chain-of-thought prompting, which breaks down large, complex questions and prompts into smaller steps mimicking human reasoning—are opening the gates to the highest quality answers and transparency in the logical inference process of AI.

Data Centers 2.0: How AI Is Transforming Operations

Steven Woo — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 22:30:04 +0000

Rapid advancements in AI are becoming commonplace, driven by large language models (LLMs) that now exceed 1 trillion parameters. While these AI models are revolutionizing many industries, their increasing demand for computational power is driving the need for more specialized and higher-performance infrastructure.

Ask the Experts: The State of AI

Steven Woo — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 22:40:17 +0000

Hear from Rambus Expert Steven Woo about the latest developments in AI and the implications for hardware and computing architecture. Learn about chain-of-thought and the innovations needed to support its computational demands.

Breaking Through The Generative AI Memory Wall

Steven Woo — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 23:42:53 +0000

The term “memory wall” was first coined in the 1990s to describe memory bandwidth bottlenecks that were holding back CPU performance. The semiconductor industry helped address this memory wall through DRAM architecture innovations, rapidly increasing memory bus widths and data rates, and better process technologies that made faster memory and interfaces manufacturable. The torrid pace of innovation in AI processing has given rise to a similar bottleneck that has created an “AI memory wall.”

The Impact of AI 2.0 on Memory & Interconnect Technology

Steven Woo — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 22:03:36 +0000

Steven Woo, Fellow and Distinguished Inventor at Rambus Labs, explores the transformative impact of AI 2.0 on memory and interconnect technology. He highlights how the rapid growth of AI models, exceeding trillions of parameters, and the shift to multimodal systems has dramatically increased the demand for higher memory capacity and bandwidth.

Addressing AI’s Insatiable Demand For Power

Steven Woo — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 22:41:16 +0000

The growth of AI has been staggering, and applications are emerging across the industry that offer new generative AI capabilities powered by large language models. The impact of these AI 2.0 applications is broad and fundamentally alters the way we interact with computers. However, this improvement in capabilities and performance has also been accompanied by massive increases in power consumption.

Semiconductor Innovations Fueling The Growth Of AI 2.0

Steven Woo — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 22:38:47 +0000

Businesses across industries are going all in on artificial intelligence (AI). Major tech companies have spent billions and plan to maintain, if not increase, their investments in AI. The International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts enterprise spending on generative AI, or AI 2.0, will reach $151.1 billion by 2027. AI’s growth has ushered in a new golden age of computer architecture, driving relentless demand for hardware innovation to deliver improvements in computational power.

Ask the Experts: Exploring the Impact of AI 2.0 on the Memory Landscape

Steven Woo — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 22:08:04 +0000

AI is a rapidly evolving space. With the meteoric rise of generative AI applications in the past year, we are now firmly in the era of AI 2.0. This is characterized by large language models that place AI into the hands of millions of consumers and enterprises offering limitless possibilities for creativity and innovation. We recently interviewed Dr. Steven Woo, fellow and distinguished inventor at Rambus Labs, to find out more about AI 2.0 and the key technologies that will shape it going forward.

Exploring Exascale Computing: Insights from SC23

Steven Woo — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 17:46:38 +0000

Supercomputing 2023 brought together some of the brightest minds in the field of high-performance computing, showcasing the latest in exascale computing and the challenges faced in the pursuit of next-generation advances in computing. Talks by Scott Atchley from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Stephen Pawlowski from Intel stood out for their valuable perspectives on the current state of supercomputing and future directions for the industry.

Frontier: Exploring Exascale

Scott Atchley, Distinguished R&D Staff Member and Chief Technology Officer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s National Center for Computational Science

Scott Atchley’s talk delved into the US supercomputer “Frontier” and its journey to meet the challenges of exascale computing. The goal was ambitious: achieving performance levels 1000 times higher than petascale systems deployed in 2008, all within a budget of 4x-6x compared to the previous generation.

Challenges identified by DARPA in 2008 when planning for Frontier included energy and power, memory and storage, concurrency and locality, and resiliency. Frontier successfully addressed these challenges, showcasing advancements in power efficiency, memory capacity and bandwidth, concurrency management, and resiliency. However, the need for a budget 4x-6x higher than the previous generation arose due to technology costs not declining by 1000x, which limited the growth of many resources compared to the previous generation of supercomputers. Components like storage and memory, particularly with the use of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), proved more expensive.

The findings underscore the complexities of achieving exascale computing and the necessity of adapting to evolving technological landscapes, especially in the face of cost dynamics in storage and memory technologies.

A Perspective on 1000x Energy Efficiency

Stephen Pawlowski, Senior Fellow, Intel

In his keynote, Stephen Pawlowski discussed the challenges of achieving 1000x energy efficiency within the next two decades. With exascale supercomputers now a reality, early thoughts are being discussed about how to improve energy consumption and power efficiency, critical factors in achieving next-generation performance.

Pawlowski highlighted the significant energy and time consumed by data movement, especially between processors and memory. To address this, he proposed stacking high-performance memory on top of a System-on-Chip (SoC). This approach promises a 5-6x reduction in energy and a 10x boost in bandwidth. The potential benefits make it a compelling path forward for the industry.

However, challenges emerge, such as the need to standardize memory footprints, determine interconnect locations, manage thermals, and address issues like Error-Correcting Codes (ECC) and post-package repair.

SC23 Show Floor Highlights

The show floor featured many exciting developments, with the CXL consortium showcasing numerous demonstrations of CXL technology, including the Rambus CXL Platform Development Kit (PDK) announced at the show. The Rambus PDK marks an exciting step in the CXL journey that enables module and system makers to prototype and test CXL-based memory expansion and pooling solutions for AI.

Rambus CXL Platform Development Kit (PDK)

AI remained a focal point at SC23, with several demos featuring cutting-edge AI platforms at both the chip and system levels. As models become larger and more sophisticated, continued advances in architecture and memory systems will be needed to keep up with these growing demands.

With computing performance continuing its upward trajectory, and with power efficiency improvements becoming more difficult with each new generation, there continue to be a noticeable increase in discussions and demonstrations of liquid cooling becoming pervasive in future data centers. There were also some intriguing immersion cooling demos, offering the promise of even greater cooling capabilities than traditional liquid cooling technology if needed by future systems.

Supercomputing 2023, through these talks and on the show floor, provided a glimpse into the relentless pursuit of higher performance, energy efficiency, and innovative solutions shaping the future of high-performance computing.