Hey, I’m Ram. AI and chips, explained from the factory floor.
This weekChips, Capacity & Supply Chain1:43
One Bad Chip Scraps the Whole Stack: The Maths Behind the AI Memory Boom
Samsung Made $75 Billion in One Quarter. The Reason Is 12 Chips Stacked Into One. The mechanism underneath it, the number that makes it real, and where I could be wrong.
This week’s story
Everything, 52 pieces
Samsung Made $75 Billion in One Quarter. The Reason Is 12 Chips Stacked Into One.
[Website catch-up note, added 19 Oct 2026 under Step 0.0: this run was produced on 11-12 Oct outside the website toolchain, so its description, diagram and site page were completed afterwards from the run's own script and the sources below. The delivered script and caption were not changed.]
Where in your process would catching a defect one step earlier save the most?
Answer on LinkedIn →Quiz of the week
All weeksA chip factory makes the cleanest water on Earth, and nobody who works there is allowed to drink it. Why not?
Ten questions from this week in chips and the factory floor. One is a match-up. Every answer is a fact from a piece on this site or a public source, and every explanation says where it came from.
10 questions, 1 match-ups, about 4 minutes. Every answer links to the piece it came from.
Take the quizPick a door
The guided tour
15 piecesAI on the factory floor
What AI actually changes in a plant, and what it never will.
- 3 AI Power Moves, 1 Week, and a Rule Chip Factories Wrote in 2000
- AI Just Asked to Slow Down. Chip Makers Wrote the Rule in 1973.
10 pieces · 39 explainersMES & shop-floor systems
The software that actually runs a factory.
- OpenAI's Data Agent Reads 7 Databases. Not One Is on a Factory Floor
- 3 AI Agent Breakouts, 1 Week, and a Red Button From 1991
27 piecesSemiconductors: chips, fabs & yield
Why a chip you can design today still cannot be built for three years.
- Samsung Made $75 Billion in One Quarter. The Reason Is 12 Chips Stacked Into One.
- Every Chip Factory Keeps a Liquid That Would Hurt You. It Is Water.
One thing to try on Monday
All 44 tipsPick one step in your process, and ask what it costs to catch a defect there, versus two steps later. That ratio is your whole yield strategy. Why it works: in any multi-step process, the cost of a defect grows with every step it survives, because each later step adds value to something that is already scrap. In a twelve-high memory stack the multiplier is brutal, but the same logic holds on any line. Write down one step, the cost of catching a defect there, and the cost two steps later. The gap tells you where inspection pays.
Twenty years in the software that runs factories. One story a week on what it taught me.
Read about FabSpeak →One email. One story. Once a week.
The week’s breakdown, the one number behind it, the caveat nobody puts in the press release, and one AI trick you can actually use at work on Monday. No roundups. No sponsored sections.
You’re on the list. The first edition lands when it goes out; nothing before, nothing else.
- A correction. The most useful message you can send.
- You work in this layer and something here was wrong, or right for the wrong reason.
- Speaking, podcast or panel.
- Something you want explained. Recurring questions become episodes.