Chip Industry Week In Review


By Susan Rambo, Gregory Haley, Jesse Allen, and Liz Allan President Biden issued an executive order on the “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” It says entities need to report large-scale computing clusters and the total computing power available, including “any model that was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 1,026 inte... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers and OEMs Apple has rolled out its most powerful processor, dubbed the M1 Ultra, a multi-die chip that incorporates the company's new packaging technology. The M1 Ultra is incorporated in Apple’s new Mac Studio desktop. M1 Ultra features a 20-core CPU, a 64-core GPU, and a 32-core Neural Engine. The M1 Ultra also features UltraFusion, Apple’s new packaging architecture. M1 Ult... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers, OEMs UMC plans to build a new fab next to its existing 300mm fab in Singapore. The new fab, called Fab12i P3, will manufacture wafers based on UMC’s 22nm/28nm processes. The planned investment for this project will be $5 billion. The first phase of this greenfield fab will have a monthly capacity of 30,000 wafers with production expected to commence in late 2024. To account fo... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Government policy As reported, the United States is in dire need of more fab capacity as well as packaging plants. The U.S. took a big step in an effort to solve the problem. The U.S. House of Representatives this week introduced the America Competes Act of 2022. The bill includes funding for the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America (CHIPS) Act, which is earmarked... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Semicon West news The Semicon West trade show opened this week with a hybrid in-person and virtual event. Several companies introduced new products or made announcements at Semicon. Some announcements coincided with the show. At Semicon, Lam Research introduced the Syndion GP, a new product that provides deep silicon etch capabilities to chipmakers developing next-generation power devices a... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Infineon Technologies acquired Syntronixs Asia, which specializes in precision electroplating, a key process in the assembly process of semiconductors. Syntronixs Asia has a workforce of more than 500 people and has been a major service provider for Infineon since 2009. “Through this acquisition, we have made another important step to strengthen the resilience of our supply chain,” said Tho... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers AMD has rolled out its new MI200 series products, the first exascale-class GPU accelerators. Using a fan-out bridge packaging technology, the MI200 series are designed for high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The MI200 series accelerators feature a multi-die GPU architecture with 128GB of HBM2e memory. Typically, the HBM2e memory stack a... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers After years in the works, GlobalFoundries is finally a public company. But on its first day of trading on Thursday (Oct. 28), shares of the foundry vendor slipped a bit. GF finished its first day of trading at $46.40. This compares to the $47 per share it priced in the initial public offering (IPO), according a report to Reuters. The chipmaker has a market capitalization of about $2... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 27


Siemens EDA's Ray Salemi continues looking into using Python for verification by looking at how pyuvm simplifies and refactors the UVM TLM system to take advantage of the fact that Python has multiple inheritance and no typing. Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in as Larry Disenhof explains the impact that export regulations have on EDA tools and IP products and changes in a rapidly shifting l... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers TSMC posted its results for the quarter and confirmed its long-awaited plans to build a fab in Japan. It’s not a leading-edge fab, but rather a plant for 28nm/22nm processes. “The company confirmed plans to build a new fab in Japan for 22nm + 28nm,” said Aaron Rakers, an analyst at Wells Fargo, in a research note. “An average 22/28nm fab costs ~$4-5B range per 45k wspm. Fab ... » read more

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