CEO of Intel, Lip-Bu Tan, mentions memory, power, high speed connectivity, optical, and liquid cooling as critical semiconductor supply chain constraints:
"I think a lot of people didn't realize — at the beginning of last year, I said memory was going to be the big bottleneck, and it turned out to be the case. Next year it's going to be even worse. Capacity is very constrained, and a lot of business has slowed down because they cannot get enough memory. Memory prices have also gone up a lot — five, six, seven times.
So it's difficult when you're doing a low-end mobile phone or laptop and you cannot have 70–80% of your cost come from memory. The other part, of course, everybody knows is power. Besides just trying to get more power — I was a nuclear engineer scientist before, so power is very important — but also how to drive the architecture to make it lower power for certain applications.
High-speed connectivity is very important, and that's why I backed Credo Semiconductor, Astera Labs. Optical has also become very important — I backed Celestial AI, which was sold to Marvel, and Dust Photonics, which I sold to Credo, along with a few others I've invested in.
The other part is cooling. Cooling is a big problem — beyond air cooling, now there's liquid cooling and microfluidic cooling, so I've invested in a couple of them."
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