Dylan PatelFounder and Chief Analyst, SemiAnalysis · The semiconductor-AI stack

STEEL: From product to transistor | SemiAnalysis Model Overview

15 Oct 2026 · 2 min

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2:05

In this presentation, Dylan Patel outlines SemiAnalysis’s “STEEL” service based in Hillsboro, Oregon – the hub of North American foundry manufacturing. He describes the end‑to‑end teardown workflow that starts with whole products (data‑center racks, consumer boxes) and proceeds through board‑level disassembly, package de‑encapsulation, and die‑level analysis. The team employs a suite of microscopy tools: high‑power optical microscopes for micron‑scale inspection, scanning electron microscopes (SEM) for nanometer‑scale imaging, and transmission electron microscopes (TEM) for atomic‑level detail such as gates, high‑k dielectrics, and doping layers. Advanced packaging techniques, especially hybrid bonding, are examined to uncover latent design features that may appear in future products. The ultimate goal is to provide technical clients with competitive intelligence—explaining why certain design choices exist, how competitors differentiate, and how they can respond. The talk ends with a sales contact invitation.

Chapters

Steel's in Hillsboro, Oregon. That's the center of North America's manufacturing and innovation for all foundry-based manufacturing. And so we're right in the thick of it. We have a lot of experts from system architecture down to device and in manufacturing and process. Tear it down, literally, physically. We get a product in. Data center might be a rack, consumer might be a box that we go and we get at the store, right? We start pulling it apart, looking at what's inside, you know, whether that displays or chips, down to the packages. Very advanced packaging is everything. No, right? But we keep going. We break into the interconnects, the different die, memory, HBM. We go in, we look at the die level, we break that down, look at system architecture and floor plan. Yeah, just basic photography, optical microscopes, right? These are high-power optical microscopes. It allows us to see things, you know, at the board level, at the product level, but all the way down to about a micron. We have electron microscopes. We can actually see down with an SEM. We can see down to a nanometer. Well, what the hell is a nanometer, right? Well, we talk about nanometer technologies and transistors. Now we can see the transistor. with an SEM, that's great, but you can't see all the fine detail. You actually have to go to an instrument called a TEM or transmission electron microscope. It uses much higher energy electrons. It actually shoots these electrons through the sample. You collect that data on the other side, and that's how you can see things like gates and high-k dielectrics and doping layers and things like this. Apple loves to test the waters with latent features and design. So the hybrid bonding, the interconnects in there, it's fun to just go in and see these things that maybe aren't even active in the current product, but we're gonna see them in that next product. That's what our technical clients, that's where they're interested in understanding what's there. Why is it there? What does it mean for themselves? How competitors, different companies differentiate and how can they respond? The companies that are going to differentiate and accelerate and make the difference are looking at this in a very holistic and very technically aggressive way. Reach out, sales@semi-analysis.com. Let's talk.