What I'm up to
A snapshot of this month, inspired by Derek Sivers' now pages. If you're reading this long after the date below, I've probably moved on.
September 2026
Updated
- Researchinghow the semiconductor industry really works
- Learningchip design, IP licensing and who gets paid for what
- Writinga sand-to-system guide to how chips are made
- Buildingthis website
Down the semiconductor rabbit hole
This month I have been talking to people across the chip industry, from small design startups to some very large companies, and each conversation left me with more questions than I started with. So I have been doing what I usually do: reading everything I can and trying to draw the whole map.
The first surprise is the scale. The industry’s statistics body, WSTS, now expects the global chip market to pass USD 1.5 trillion in 2026, almost double the year before. Nearly all of that jump comes from AI: data centres are buying accelerators and high-bandwidth memory as fast as fabs can make them, and memory prices have gone through the roof.
The second surprise is how specialised it is. Almost nobody does everything. Some companies only design chips and never own a factory. Others only manufacture, and one of them, TSMC, now takes over 70 per cent of all foundry revenue. A single Dutch company, ASML, builds every extreme-ultraviolet lithography machine the leading fabs rely on, and plans to ship more than 60 of them this year.
The part I find most interesting is design and IP. Most chip companies don’t design every block from scratch. They license processor cores, interfaces and memory controllers from firms like Arm, Synopsys and Cadence, much as software teams reach for open-source libraries, then stitch those blocks together with their own ideas. With chiplets, the stitching is moving into the package too. The business models are fascinating: upfront licence fees, a royalty on every chip shipped, and now Arm making finished chips of its own, which blurs the line between supplier and competitor.
And closer to home, India’s chip story is finally getting physical. Twelve projects have been approved under the India Semiconductor Mission, several packaging plants are already shipping, and the first large silicon fab is aiming for first wafers around the end of this year. I want to understand where the real opportunities sit: design talent, packaging, equipment services or something nobody is talking about yet.
All of this is turning into my first long post: a sand-to-system walk through how a chip gets made, who does each step, and where the value lands. It should be up soon.
Outside of chips, most of my spare hours are still going into this site.