Letter to the subscribers - Year 1
Thoughts on a year writing Chip Insights
Disclaimer: Opinions shared in this, and all my posts are mine, and mine alone. They do not reflect the views of my employer(s) and are not investment advice.
This post is not about chips. It’s not even about AI like that one post was. This is about me.
As I’m writing this, it’s been a year since I wrote my first post on Chip Insights. So, I thought I’ll reflect a little and open up about my plans for the future.
Why did I start Chip Insights?
Ideally, this should have been a part of my first post. But I did not have a good answer. Instead, I chose to write about Moore’s law:
Turns out, Moore’s law was actually the perfect way to start, because, like the number of transistors in a chip, ideas compound exponentially. Every new post I have written here has made me an exponentially better thinker. So more than anything, Chip Insights is my training ground; the place where I take half-baked ideas and make them concrete. I learn more from Chip Insights than any of my readers.
Well if that’s my reason, one could ask (and a lot of people have asked) why I post this content publicly. I have found that there is a huge difference in the way I think in private, versus when I need to present my ideas. The vulnerability associated with public content has pushed me to think more deeply than I would have in a private brainstorming session. For instance, I always thought I knew what CPU bitness was, but when I decided to write a post about it, I realized how complex that number truly is.
What do I offer?
I’m aware that in a post addressing my subscribers, the right way to answer the “why” question is to say something altruistic, something like “I want to pass on my learnings to students.” It’s nice when that happens, but I would be lying to myself if I said everything I do is towards that goal. However, I have two ways of thinking that one might consider altruistic.
First, I am convinced that the positioning of computer engineering as a career needs some work. There are a few attributes that computer engineering has acquired over time which does not sit well with me: slow-moving, hard, and risk-averse come to mind. A lot of very talented students are put-off by these attributes. The emergence of AI has made semiconductors cool again, and I want to use this opportunity to reframe how the industry is perceived. For example, not a lot of people know how fast-paced the EDA world was - a story I covered here.
There’s another issue. Even if you like this industry and want to pursue your career here, there are too many roadblocks, which eventually kills potential talent. I am not in a position to bring about structural changes to the industry, but one thing I can do is to reduce some anxiety in the process of making it, which is what led to posts like this.
How is Chip Insights different?
I have done some technical writing before Chip Insights - in school, at work, and also authoring research papers. But the advantage of a medium like this is the freedom it provides. I have used this freedom in three ways.
First, I was able to bypass the need to explain concepts from the ground up - as you would do in a typical college program. For example, the right way to understand power consumption in chip design is to first understand exactly how a transistor works. But I have always found this to be a bit restrictive - in the case of chip power, only engineers with visibility to the transistor level contribute ideas, and they are often quite similar. If a software engineer wants to understand what makes a chip power efficient, they would be scared off by all the complex transistor-level terminology and would make no progress. My post on power optimization was an attempt to see how much I could abstract out without being inaccurate - turns out, quite a lot.
Another theme in most of my technical post is the idea of analogies - comparing chip design concepts to something relatable - to make them stick in your mind a little longer. I know some people, especially the “academic” types, find analogies to be juvenile. But I have actually found that thinking in terms of analogies, and stretching them out as much as possible really strengthens your understanding of something. For example, I tried that with on-chip networks by comparing them to airline routes in this post.
Finally, there is world building. I think this is the hardest to crack, because building interesting worlds isn’t easy - if it were, The Walt Disney Company wouldn’t be worth $200 billion. But if you can build a world that is compelling enough, then even reading about a pedestrian topic like Static Timing Analysis can be made fun, which is what I tried here.
How has my writing evolved?
I never realized this, but a lot of my early posts were based on topics which had very little scope for subjectivity - for example, this post about pipelining, which walks through how a traditional CPU pipeline has always looked like.
I think a part of me was unsure about how new ideas would be perceived - especially from someone who lacks authority. But as I went forward on this journey, I think my writing has become more assertive. I wrote a post on how AI will influence EDA, which was away from my comfort zone, because, well, nobody still knows the answer.
A bolder version of this was my more recent post about full-stack chip design, and idea that irked a lot of readers on Hacker News, but something that I believe is a well thought out analysis.
I also expanded to cover aspects beyond technical knowledge, because I think the kind of person you are strongly influences the kind of engineer you would be, and we engineers are very bad at understanding this. I aim to do more of this, but one place where I see this mattering a lot is technical interviews, which prompted me to write this post.
How to predict the future?
With the great power of assertiveness comes a great responsibility - the responsibility of being right. (More often than not, at least.) So how can someone get better at that? The best way I know to predict the future is to learn from the past - that’s the only formula that seems to work. (When AI takes over, I’m pretty sure they’ll tell us the same thing.) Exploring semiconductor history has been one of the most rewarding experiences of this journey, and posts like this will continue to be a big part of Chip Insights.
The other way to predict the future is to learn about great companies and their strategies. Patterns in business repeat themselves - success is about finding the right pattern. I captured my learnings from one of the most successful companies of our time in this post.
So, what’s the future of Chip Insights?
Posting an article (almost) every week for the last year has been a great experience - I learn a lot each time I do it, and hopefully could pass on some of my learnings in the process. But something that I have enjoyed even more than that has been the feeling that writing unlocks in me - every time I plan to write a new article, I want to reinvent myself and try something different. This feeling is powerful, and I have seen that it spreads across all aspects of my life - not just writing. But I am realizing that the best way to reinvent is not always to do it more often…
In chip design companies, a common practice used to innovate better is called the “tick-tock” model. Here, a “tick” project involves incremental improvements that can be completed quickly. But after a few ticks, companies pursue a “tock” project - a big structural change, usually dubbed as the next chip generation. In the last year, Chip Insights has seen a lot of ticks that I’ve highlighted in this post, but it’s time for a tock. There are few new ideas that I would like to pursue, which needs me to take a break from writing.
Whether this is the first post of mine you are reading, or you are that one subscriber who subscribed even before I wrote my first ever post, (that really happened, still don’t know why, but I’ll take it.) or maybe you came in somewhere along the way, thank you so much for showing that you care.
I urge you to stay subscribed, because the love for writing hasn’t left me. (And it never will.) I’ll be back soon with Chip Insights 2.0, and it will be worth your wait. Until then, I bid adieu.
Congrats Bharath! Very well done and looking forward to many more years.
Congrats! Wow a year already! Keep going!