Hardware

Qualcomm is synonymous with top-tier smartphone performance these days, but the market was once much more competitive.

Source Financial Times article

Summary

Demand for artificial intelligence-enabled smartphones could help to protect parts of the semiconductor industry from a “vicious” downturn if investment in data centres slows, said the chief executive of the world’s largest provider of chip testing machines.

A fall-off “may not last long and then it may go right back up, but because of the concentration [of hyperscalers] right now in the market, any slowdown in the data centre buildout is going to have big reverberations in the supply chain”, said Lefever.

In contrast, demand for AI smartphones was “kind of slow” but could take off rapidly, Lefever said.

Summary

According to the Financial Times, citing Doug Lefever, the chief executive of Advantest, it takes three to four times longer to test Blackwell data center GPUs than Hopper data center GPUs because each unit has to be tested dozens of times on different tools before shipping.

Typically, as the transistor count grows, test complexity grows almost exponentially, as chips require more test patterns and longer test times. Test protocols must cover high-speed interconnects, stress conditions, thermal conditions (which, in the case of the B200, are extreme), and multiple operational modes (Blackwell adds FP4 support).

There's more to this. TSMC's CoWoS-L 2.5D packaging techniques introduce additional test steps (and sometimes multiple test phases) to ensure that each component in the package is functioning correctly and that interconnects are reliable.