Judy Warner (00:01.027) Hi Matt, thanks so much for joining us again. I'm glad to have you back on the podcast. Matthew Burns (00:06.05) Judy, it's always a privilege to talk with you. We love being on your podcast series. Judy Warner (00:10.243) Thanks, well I love having you, it's always a fun talk. So I thought I'd get you back in as we sort of cruise into fall and head towards winter. A couple podcasts ago, we talked about sort of paving the road to 224 gig. And I know just from being on LinkedIn and seeing stuff that you're posting that you're definitely making headway in that regard. And so... You know, you've been talking about online about this new era of high speed, um, really high speed technology trends, but high speed technology overall. So what, what do you see going on and what can you share with our listeners in that regard? Matthew Burns (00:54.218) Yeah, that's a great way to set up our conversation, Judy. And one of the things that we're really focusing in on, the second half of 23 going into 24, is what we see as a new era of high-speed connectivity. A lot of people in the industry interconnect signal integrity, chipsets, EDA, testing measurement. Everyone's focused on 224. And they should be. We should be as an industry, because that's obviously the next generation speed node. But it's not just 224 that's influencing high-speed connectivity. Some of the trends that we're seeing, obviously PCI Express 6.0 was released last year. PCI SIG has talked about PCI 7. You're making that jump from 64 giga transfers per second to 128 giga transfer per second. They're targeting a release of 25, I think, 2025 for the base spec. CXL when it comes to cache coherent memory design is writing the PCI SIG code I shouldn't say coattails, but they're leveraging the infrastructure of PCI SIG, CXL 3.0 supports, or uses PCI Express 6.0. So those are obviously both great networking fabrics that are driving interconnect between the main compute engine on a system and various peripherals. Plus, we're seeing increased demand for optics at speeds. There's a lot of question in the industry. Judy Warner (02:18.639) Hmm. Matthew Burns (02:21.87) At 224, are we going to do a copper on package in the front panel, or are we going to use optics on package, NPO, CPO, like it's called? So there's a lot of interesting things. So from Samtech's perspective, we have our fingers in all those areas. So we really see it not only as answering the clarion call of getting to 224, because again, that's the big focus. But all these little niches on the fabric side, copper versus optics, how does RF fit in there? Because obviously you have to be able to test this stuff and you're testing 224, 56 gigabit NRZ. There's all these trends that are kind of tying together and obviously Samtech's, our reason for being is to route the data from point A to point B over the channel, copper, optic in the RF world. Judy Warner (03:13.26) Right. Matthew Burns (03:15.922) So that's kind of where our focus is at is, how can we, how do we observe all these trends? How do we play our part in trying to help connect everything together? And then, where are the markets taking us? So I think that's kind of been our big focus in the second half of the year going into 24. Judy Warner (03:34.575) So. What technologies, you mentioned a few, right? A few, but like what other technologies are driving these kinds of speeds? Applications. Matthew Burns (03:49.783) Yeah, well, sorry to interrupt you. I apologize. You and I and everybody in the industry is so excited about what seems like the endless possibility of artificial intelligence and machine learning. I've been, I don't know if dumbfounded is the right word, but I've been really excited at the interest that the general public has in artificial intelligence. And I think we can all agree that Judy Warner (04:01.335) Yeah. Matthew Burns (04:15.574) Chat GPT was really an inflection point where the general public finally starts to grasp the power of these giant-sized AI models. And that's one application, right? For generative, I guess we should be careful how we talk about Chat GPT, because it may put you in item business. But that's another conversation. I'm joking, of course. No one can replace you, Judy. They can replace me, but not you. Judy Warner (04:27.7) Mm-hmm. Right. Judy Warner (04:38.479) Yeah, we're kind of a... Yeah, no, that's not true. Guy, have you seen some of the weird AI video stuff now? It's exciting and a little scary, but we're weirdos, so we're always excited. We might be plunging to our death soon, but we're always running to the next shiny thing. Matthew Burns (04:51.154) It is. We'll see. Yeah, we'll see. But aside from chat DPT, there are some interesting and timely data sets and data models that AI has to answer. I was just at an AI industry trade show in Silicon Valley a few weeks ago. And you know. obviously NVIDIA is the leader there, but there's this entire giant ecosystem of AI chipset providers, AMD, Intel, and a bunch of others, right? It's startups like Samba Nova, et cetera, et cetera. So there's this whole ecosystem that is focused on trying to efficiently handle these large dataset AI problems, whether it's natural language algorithms or something like a chat GPT, which is a, you know. text inference, text learning, et cetera, et cetera. So that whole ecosystem is, everyone talked about the hockey stick effect and we're at the bottom of the hockey stick in terms of where AI is taking us. So that's affecting everything, right? Is AI designing AI chipsets? That's something Synopsys talked about from Synopsys and Cadence and EDA vendors. So you can't sit here and say that AI isn't going to influence high speed connectivity, right? Or that next era of high speed connectivity. And then when you start to look at AI implementation, AI hardware system architecture implementations, almost all of them are application specific. You can run, and here's the way I like to think about it. You or I could run chat GPT on a single GPU on something that's personal size. But to scale that across a data center or multiple data centers so that you get real time feedback for a gajillion users, Judy Warner (06:27.075) Mm-hmm. Matthew Burns (06:45.462) you need 10,000 GPUs. That's a lot of space. That's a lot of data centers. Last I checked, that's a lot of connectors to connect all these GPUs together, or cable assemblies, or optics, or whatever the case may be. So AI is definitely a major trend that we see. And, you know, desegregating, sorry, that's okay. Judy Warner (06:54.155) Right. Judy Warner (07:03.599) By the way, I'm sorry to interrupt you this time, Matt. I have to say this and I bet you when I ask you this, you'll say, yep, yep. I've had two recent conversations with thought leaders in our industry and twice. And one was in a conversation about Nvidia and I was asking about technology drivers and they both mentioned this unlikely word, TikTok. I'm like what? But Nvidia is selling a huge number of chips because of the processing speed it takes for this gigantic load of streaming video and I was like boy I didn't see that one coming. Matthew Burns (07:31.311) Of course. Matthew Burns (07:46.57) Yeah, or Netflix. Another application is Netflix. You watch one movie, whatever your tastes are, and all of a sudden you've got 10 recommendations. So yeah, those practical examples illustrate how AI can perform such a powerful function in our day-to-day life. But going back to high-speed connectivity, to enable those types of functionalities, it takes a ton of compute engines, it takes a ton of servers, it takes a ton of interconnect, it takes a ton of throughput. So that's where you start to get into scalability, flexibility, obviously 224 comes into that when it comes to next generation channel data rates. But you start to get into another trend that we're starting to see, and this is not starting, but continuing to grow, disaggregated computing, homogeneity, I can never say that word. And it is, in computing, right, it's not just using. Judy Warner (08:35.523) That's a tricky one. Matthew Burns (08:40.974) It's not just how do I figure out how to use a server to become more efficient. It's how do I re-architect the compute system to be fine-tuned towards the end application. So, you know, there's all these trends that are driving connectivity needs. And that's in addition to just general data, you know, data center growth and general throughput growth as the Internet expands around the globe. You know, something else that popped into my head in terms of applications, you know, you look at... 5G and Open RAND and the fact that there's the big effort to use, you know, Mio, Leo, Geo satellites to create a global internet coverage in any corner of the world so that you can take a TikTok when you're in the middle of the Sahara Desert. I actually used that in a presentation recently. And it doesn't sound like it's practical, but in essence, that's all these high... this new era of high-speed connectivity is enabling all these use cases that three to five years ago we wouldn't have thought about. Judy Warner (09:10.109) Oh yeah. Matthew Burns (09:37.514) or wouldn't have thought about. And it requires, when it comes back to Samtech, when it comes back to semiconductor providers, when it comes back to EDA tester measurements, like how do we enable that at the physical layer? And innovation is just accelerating across the ecosystem. And everyone's trying to keep up, everyone's trying to innovate their competitors. So I think talking about trends, that's kind of where we're at right now, Judy, at least that's what I see. Judy Warner (10:04.619) Well, you know, I'm out here to sort of take in the pulse, right? And like, I feel it. I feel it. And one of the just incredible things I was just talking to Steve Sandler and Heidi Barnes at Keysight about was that there, that Steve is unleashing a refrigerated probe for testing at package speed at like 2000 volts. I'm like, what? Testing a package speed. So again, I'm sure, and then this just ripples out, right? Right, and so I feel all the disconnected pieces so you're helping me and probably our audience put all those pieces together. So, yeah, go ahead. No, you go. Matthew Burns (10:44.654) Well, I'm sorry, go ahead. I apologize. Yeah, one of the things I was thinking too is that when it comes to scaling the AI infrastructure, we're looking at next generation AI chip sets that have TDPs of 1.2, 1.5 kilowatts on a single chip. That's a lot of power. That's also a lot of heat. Judy Warner (11:08.791) ton of power. Matthew Burns (11:11.466) So not only do you have to get the data in at 224, but how do you get the power in and then how do you get the heat out? And then multiply that by 10,000. So there's a ton of it, like I said, like you said, I apologize, there's a ton of trends kind of coming to an inflection point that if we don't solve it as an ecosystem, we're not gonna move forward. Judy Warner (11:11.799) Yep. Judy Warner (11:21.965) Yeah. Judy Warner (11:39.563) Well, so that's a great jumping off place. So we talked, I don't know, it's been less than a year, but more than six months maybe that we talked about that as we move towards something like 224, that the ecosystem has to grow up around it, which is also a theme that I'm seeing sort of across the industry. And it's all of this, right? Just different aspects of this story. So since the last time we talked, maybe six or more. months ago, where's the ecosystem today growing up around these speeds that maybe you're noticing at Samtech and some of the work you're doing there? Matthew Burns (12:20.838) It goes back to something Samtech's always messaged, Judy, integration leads to innovation. That's sort of an internal tagline because we like to take, you know, we have a lot of groups of technologists, optical, thermal, interconnect, electrical, whatever. How do we get the right people working together on the right solution at the right time, right? And that's not a concept that only Samtech promotes, but. Judy Warner (12:27.449) Mm. Judy Warner (12:37.164) Mm. Matthew Burns (12:47.126) For some of these solutions and some of these challenges that the industry is facing at 224, you can have the, let's go back to just the chipset example for just a second. You can have the best team of signal integrity engineers, electrical engineers and whatever to get all that data in and out of that chip, right? Design the right chiplets, design the right substrates, design the right package, how you attach it to the PCB, you optimize the BOR. And that's all in Samtech's wheelhouse. Judy Warner (12:56.868) Mm-hmm. Matthew Burns (13:17.026) or most of it's in Samtex wheelhouse. But what do you do with that power? What do you do with kilowatts and megawatts of power within a single rack? Thermal specialists, power integrity specialists, that's not just one company. It's not just one company. So it's really, how can the ecosystem partners work together to almost come up with an application specific solution, if that makes sense. A good example, for a lot of our solutions, Judy Warner (13:17.74) Right. Matthew Burns (13:46.63) whether it's our Firefly optical transceivers or some of the next-gen interconnect where we're applying copper on package or copper near package I should say. We're creating a generic, a flexible type of generic heat sink with a flat top on it. And what that allows for is someone applying a cold plate Judy Warner (14:05.688) Mmm. Judy Warner (14:08.991) Oh, that's interesting. Matthew Burns (14:14.978) that can be used either liquid cooled or just passive, or depending upon the application, maybe they put a pin-fin style solution on it that allows for just convection cooling. Again, it all depends on the specifications, the parameters of the system. And then obviously for some of these higher power solutions, is it immersion? Which poses its own challenges unto itself. So that's really kind of where we're focusing in on. The reason I bring that up, you're talking about next generation solutions. One of the platforms that we start to engage some of our tier one customers with is what we're calling SciFly HD. We came up with our SciFly solution, which was designed as an ASIC adjacent interconnect that was very low profile that could fit next to an ASIC. And then the heat sink could extend over that. Judy Warner (15:12.771) Hmm. Matthew Burns (15:14.298) we've altered that approach so that instead of having a right angle launch, we have a vertical launch. And that allows us to get the density that's needed to support the 1024 differential pairs coming out of the next generation Ethernet switching ICs that we see on the industry from Broadcom and some of the other Avago, Broadcom, Avago, and some of the other solution providers there as well. So we can handle the SI. But we're having to work with partners in terms of how do we package that on a substrate, how do we package that on a package, how do we get the heat out? So we're working with thermal providers, we're working with power providers. So that SciFly HD solution is one of the first solutions that we're starting to introduce in the market. We're going to have a soft launch of it at some trade shows, ECOC later in the fall here in North America and Europe. Judy Warner (15:46.681) Right. Matthew Burns (16:08.682) So to me, that illustrates the need for an ecosystem, not only from the SI standpoint, but power, thermal, et cetera, et cetera. Judy Warner (16:16.279) So what does the ECLC mean? Matthew Burns (16:20.294) I knew someone was going to ask me that. It's, it's, ECOC is the European equivalent of. Matthew Burns (16:29.982) OFC here in the US. So it's a European focus optics show. And the event's coming up here the first week of October in Glasgow, Scotland. So it's an event that's timed nicely every six months between OFC's typically March in San Diego, and then ECOC is usually in the October time frame in Europe. It travels around Europe. Judy Warner (16:32.071) Oh, like an optical. Okay, all right. Matthew Burns (16:58.262) but very similar audiences. It's focused on optical networking. But the industry's evolved beyond that because it's copper optics RF test. So it's a show that we haven't attended for a while, but we're going back to the event this year. And we're really excited about it because I think it's going to give us an opportunity not only to engage with emerging ecosystem partners and customers in the European market or the EMEA market, but also just to collaborate. more with semiconductor companies, EDA companies, test and measurement companies and the like on the system level solutions where the partnerships with ecosystems needed. Judy Warner (17:39.759) So if I'm hearing you correctly, what's easiest for you to do is actually make something real, put the ecosystem together to solve this real problem and then sort of extrapolate out from that and continue to scale. Did I get it right? Matthew Burns (17:53.474) That's it in a nutshell. You and I are talking on a podcast, so it's kind of hard to encapsulate all the details in a few minutes, but yeah. Judy Warner (17:59.311) Right and yeah and I'm not asking you to but that's what I heard and correct me if I'm wrong please. Matthew Burns (18:05.994) No, that's it in a nutshell, Judy. And to me, it's because the challenges that Samtech's trying to solve, as well as the high speed connectivity ecosystem is trying to solve, those partnerships and those technology joint ventures, and however companies encapsulate it, those are just necessary, because it's almost impossible for one company to do it. Or... if you're an OEM that's designing these next generation systems, OK, I can work with company X on the front panel. I can work with company Y on the back plane. I can work with company Z on package or ASIC adjacent. I can work with the company A when it comes to optics, et cetera, et cetera. So to me, it's a really interesting time. And we see just a ton of innovation that's going on. And I think with our. With CM Tech's commitment to service, we have this sudden service model that you're so familiar with and your listeners are so familiar with, I think that gives us a heads up because not only do we have the technology solutions, but we're gonna do everything we can to work with our partners and our customers to find the right solution for the unique application in this new era of high-speed connectivity. Judy Warner (19:20.791) Well, it's just such a unique model and you know without being a cuckoo Sam tech cheerleader. I do think because you take so much information from bottom up but it's not really bottom up. You're getting frontline information from industry from and you know feeding it up and then the way that you're structured internally because you're a privately held company that can be sort of Judy Warner (19:49.927) business units and little silos. So I, you know, whatever, I'm a fan. I should get some Samtech pom-poms. Send me some orange pom-poms. Right? I know. I got tigers, but then I gave them away to other people to, you know, I gave my pom-poms away anyways. Matthew Burns (19:59.379) How about if we send you some tigers? Everybody loves our stuff tigers. We go to the trade shows all the time and people are. OK. Matthew Burns (20:11.79) No problem. We'll have to replace those for you, Judy, so you can be our cheerleader on the West Coast. We appreciate that, by the way. Judy Warner (20:15.759) Okay. All right. Okay. So, okay. Say you're an engineer working for a fairly large OEM and you're head down solving problems or you're an SI engineer on a big engine, what, um, in your mind, this is kind of a big question. Um, what should they be paying attention to? Um, and maybe onboarding learning resources. course through Samtech but just other places across the industry. What should they be learning? What should they be paying attention to? Matthew Burns (20:52.762) And that's a great question. And I think that ties into some of the topics we talked about earlier, right? 224, even when you talk to people like Steve Sandler or Isvon Novak or Scott McMurrow and some of the other leaders with Nathan Tracy at TE, some of the other folks that we have in the industry, they know signal integrity like the back of their hand. They really do. I mean, I listen to Scott or Isfond or some of the folks we have just talk and I learn stuff just by, you know, they've forgotten more than we'll ever learn, right? In essence. And that's not an exaggeration. You know those folks, you work with them on a consistent basis, Judy. So with engineers at OEMs, they're so focused on getting the job done, they've got so much demand on their time, but they have to keep their skill sets fresh. Judy Warner (21:26.447) for sure. Matthew Burns (21:44.522) So Samtech, we've always tried to work to do our part to educate the industry on the nuances of signal integrity. But we've really tried to focus on that over the last year or two because of the need for increased collaboration, increased awareness around the challenges at 224. So some of the things that we've been working on over the last six to 12 months, we've mentioned some of these things to you, but just to reiterate for your listeners, something that's been really successful when we really started this Judy Warner (21:44.62) Yes. Matthew Burns (22:14.416) pandemic is our GeekSpeak webinar series. You know, obviously when the pandemic started March, April, you know, a bunch of people were like, I need help, but I don't know what to do. And it was the perfect time to just, for engineers to kind of refresh their training. Judy Warner (22:17.559) Mm-hmm. Matthew Burns (22:29.706) and sharpen their skills. And we built this immediate audience because of the unique opportunity that we've had. And now we've been delivering Geek Speaks monthly for the last three plus years. And we have a loyal group of audience that we've been able to cultivate and curate. They send in suggestions in terms of, hey, I need something on this topic. I need something on that topic. It's been good for Samtech too because obviously we've got our core SI luminaries. like we mentioned with Isfahan and Gus and Scott and Rich Malletts and others. But we're starting to pass that knowledge on to, if you will, the next generation. of SI engineering talent within the company. So not only have our luminaries been presenting, but our next generation of SI engineers have also been presenting. And they've gone through this training process, learning from the best of the best, and they're passing on what they've learned to the industry. And we've really developed a really good following there. So now we've also gotten some feedback and some recommendations like, hey, Samtech, we love your GeekSpeak webinars, but I don't have time to sit there Judy Warner (23:10.159) Mm-hmm. Matthew Burns (23:38.78) 45 to 60 minutes and learn the intricacies of VIA design at 224. I need to refresh my understanding of some basics on SI. So two things that we've done there, Judy, and these are all available on our website, which we'll share at the end of the discussion. We refreshed, updated, and expanded our signal integrity handbook. And what that was based on is that we have a team of what we call frontline signal integrity engineers, that when someone contacts us via email, this is a compendium of the most common questions that we get from our partners and from our engineering customers across the globe. What is insertion loss? What is return loss? What is crosstalk? How do those SI parameters affect my design, et cetera, et cetera. So we've taken all that information, a lot of it's... up here in our engineers. And we've tried to put it down on paper in an organized and logical way. And we released the updated signal integrity handbook at DesignCon 23. And the interest in it has been higher than we expected. So we're real excited about that. We have printed versions up that there's no charge to it. We give it out and hard copy at our trade shows. It's also available for download on our website. So that's one thing. The second is that engineers love to watch videos, especially short videos. So to complement the webinars and to complement the handbook, this year we launched, I think it was June or July, what we call our GeekSpeak video series. And these are two-minute videos with answers from about 8 to 10 of our SI thought leaders answering those basic questions. What is insertion loss? What is return loss? Why does impedance matter? And there's a whole bevy of topics. We've released about 10 to 15 videos so far. We're releasing about one a week. And we plan to just continue to release one a week for the foreseeable future until we run out of topics, which who knows when that'll be. So those are kind of three big things. And obviously, Judy, participating in podcasts like this with you, we're always putting on webinars with our partners or by ourselves. And Matthew Burns (26:01.234) As you know, there's never an end to the need for our engineering community to continue to keep their skillset sharp. And we're trying to do the best we can through GeekSpeak webinar series, GeekSpeak video series, our SI handbook and our new landing page at samtech.com slash sig, SigGnome Tech Group. That's where you can find links to all these tools that are helping to educate the market, helping to educate the next generation of engineers. Judy Warner (26:30.903) You know, it's, I need to course agree with you. And the only thing I think I'd add to that, and I know you will totally agree with me 100% is get out to those trade shows when you can. You know, I know DesignCon is right after the first of the year. Are there any other shows Samtech's gonna be at besides the ECLC and DesignCon coming up, Matt? Matthew Burns (26:44.187) Yeah. Matthew Burns (26:54.122) Yeah, so great question. It's a nice segue. We're taking this message, if you will, of the new era of high-speed connectivity on the road, no pun intended. So coming up in October, sorry, I'm not good with one-liners. Coming up in October, we have the ECOC show. It's the first week of October, which is in Glasgow. So we'll be having a soft launch of our SciFly HD product, which I mentioned. Judy Warner (27:05.711) Thanks for watching! Matthew Burns (27:22.526) We've been showing that to some of some key customers already under NDA. We're getting to, at ECOC, we're also getting ready to launch a next generation optical transceiver. So we'll be publicizing soon for information. information on that here in the next couple weeks. After ECOC, obviously a ton of folks in the industry are going to be at OCP in San Jose, the Open Compute Project, focused on open source data center. So not only are the presentations around OCP thought provoking and market leading, but the list of attendees and sponsors is always quite impressive. It always fills up McInerney's Convention Center there in San Jose, so it's really it's always a cool event to go to. Supercomputing is really making a strong come back, right? We'll be attending that event in Denver the week before the U.S. Thanksgiving here. A lot of just because of the pandemic, super computing may have suffered a little bit more than other events, but it's really made a comeback over the last year or two. So the whole ecosystem of those that use high-performance computers, government, academia, industry, and the ecosystem of components and sub-component providers. Judy Warner (28:21.007) Mm-hmm. Matthew Burns (28:38.07) just reinvigorated. So we'll be there in November in Denver. And then obviously, everyone is starting to talk about DesignCon 2024. So that always seems to be the big event in our industry, Judy, and I know you and I always see it. I know you and I and our colleagues and friends always see each other and we always look forward to it as well. Judy Warner (28:59.795) Yeah, I loved when I've stolen a couple of things from you, Matt Burns. One is I now call design con the Superbowl of electronics. So I love that. And the other thing, you know, sort of recap our conversation is you said something to me and it really struck me is you started to say, you know, forever we've talked about, you know, getting out of your disciplinary or your, your silos, right? Matthew Burns (29:09.63) Okay, excellent. Judy Warner (29:28.879) And you made a good point to say, this bees are too fast now, you can't. You can't, and if you do, it's to your own peril. And so those are two things that you've taught me and that I've quoted you many times on. So much since then, when I did my pre-show last year, I called it a tailgate party. So thanks for that little nugget. Ha ha ha. Matthew Burns (29:51.306) No problem. We're glad to. I actually, for Super, I have to give credit to a Samtech, one of my Samtech buddies, John Riley, who I know you know. He's actually the one internal that came up with calling DesignCon the Super Bowl of electronics. So I don't wanna take his thunder. Okay, well we'll have to make sure you meet him at DesignCon. Yeah. All right, fair enough. I don't know if you guys have seen it, Judy Warner (30:05.331) Okay, I don't know John, so I okay, I will give John creds on it, but I heard it from you. So well, Matt, thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to come update us on everything you're working on. It's overwhelming. As you said, it's exciting. And there's just so much going on. So appreciate you coming in, giving our audience a sneak peek of behind the scenes and all the stuff that Samtech's working on and really was trending across the industry. Matthew Burns (30:36.01) No problem, Judy. We're glad to be here. It's always fun and a privilege to talk with you and talk with your listeners. So thanks for the opportunity again. Judy Warner (30:42.855) My pleasure. For our listeners, thanks so much for joining us today. Matt mentioned the Signal Integrity Handbook, which is not only on the Samtech website, and I'll share those links with you for GeekSpeak and all the things that Matt mentioned, but I also have it available on the Ecosystem website for download in digital form. So pick one of those places, go download it, because everyone I've talked to absolutely loves that thing. And then the Signal Integrity 101 and the videos they've created and these shorts are really great and it's you know, really fast digestible little wisdom Nuggets of wisdom. So make sure you go check out the show notes and grab all those goodies Thanks for joining us today and we will see you next week until then remember to always stay connected to the ecosystem!