Chip Industry Week In Review

Geopolitics

U.S. lawmakers are urging tighter export controls on advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME) to China, warning existing loopholes threaten national security. “China is working to build domestic SME by exploiting access to U.S. and allied subcomponents required to produce tools,” states the letter, which also says better coordination with allies is essential.

The U.S. is considering exempting major tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft from planned new tariffs on imported chips as they build AI data centers, reports the Financial Times. The exemptions would be tied to investment commitments by TSMC in U.S. fabs, but the plan is still fluid and has not been finalized.

Meanwhile, Taiwan’s tariff negotiator, Cheng Li-chiun, publicly rejected U.S. calls to shift roughly 40% of the island’s semiconductor production capacity to the U.S., calling such a transfer “impossible” given the deeply integrated ecosystem built over decades.

Applied Materials reached a settlement with the U.S. government to resolve allegations that certain customer shipments to China from November 2020 to July 2022 didn’t comply with U.S. export control rules. Under the agreement, Applied will pay a $252M civil penalty.

New Technologies

Cadence launched its ChipStack AI Super Agent, an agentic AI design solution for front-end silicon design and verification, providing major productivity improvements.  The company also taped out 32GT/s UCIe IP subsystem on Samsung 4nm.

Keysight released its SOS Enterprise advanced engineering data management platform to enable enterprise-scale AI adoption with automated compliance, enhanced data security and access control, and improved IP reuse across sites.

Samsung began mass production and commercial shipments of its industry-first HBM4.

SK hynix introduced a new hybrid architecture to utilize both HBM and HBF (high-bandwidth flash) that leverages the core strengths of each.

Deals, Funding

UK-based Olix raised $200M for its optical TPU for AI workloads, targeting faster and cheaper chips than Nvidia’s.

Applied Materials announced that Samsung Electronics will join its new $5B EPIC Center in Silicon Valley, a collaborative R&D facility designed to accelerate materials and process innovation.

Reports

Deloitte’s semiconductor outlook reports that GenAI chips are driving 50% of the forecasted $975B revenue in annual sales in 2026, despite making up only 0.2% of total unit volume. AI network fabric spending is expected to climb 38% in annual growth over the next few years to support the gigawatt-scale data center buildouts.

SEMI reported that worldwide silicon wafer shipments in 2025 grew 5.8% to about 12,973 million square inches (MSI), driven by strong demand for advanced epitaxial wafers used in logic and HBM tied to AI applications.

People

Markus Mosen joined Imagination Technologies as the company’s new CEO. He formerly held positions at NXP, Infineon, and WeEn Semiconductors.

Victor Peng, former president of AMD, joined Rambus‘ Board of Directors.

Financial releases

Amkor, Arteris, Applied Materials, Astera Labs, Cohu, GlobalFoundries, Entegris, Kioxia, Lattice, onsemi, PDF Solutions, SMIC, TSMC (Jan. revenue),  Tower.

Quick links to more news

Global
Funding, Deals, Reports
New Technologies
In-Depth
Research
Automotive and Batteries
Universities and Workforce
Security
Trending Video
Quantum
Events and Further Reading

Global

Asia

Qualcomm taped out a 2nm chip design at its Bengaluru, India, facility, reports the Business Standard.

The S. Korean government will launch a ~$688M “K-on-device AI semiconductor” development project, starting next month, to create roughly 10 AI chips for applications from autonomous vehicles to robots.

Europe

A Dutch Court of Appeal ordered an investigation into alleged mismanagement at Nexperia.

imec inaugurated a 2,000m² cleanroom expansion at its Leuven headquarters, aimed at sub-2nm.

EuroPractice consortium secured funding until September 2028 under Chips JU, enabling over 600 universities to design ICs and smart integrated systems, and use fabrication services in more than 90 technologies.

Americas

Texas’ semiconductor fund is awarding a $14M grant to Coherent to accelerate scaled production of InP wafers at its facility in Sherman. The fund also issued a grant of $4M to Arm for an expansion of their Austin campus to include a new semiconductor lab with failure analysis capabilities.

Data centers are facing growing backlash, prompting lawmakers to take action. A bipartisan bill called the GRID Act aims to prevent data centers from increasing energy costs. Another bill looks to curb data center growth by suspending the issuance of any new sales and use tax exemptions. Meanwhile, Meta broke ground on a 1GW, $10B data center in Indiana.

In-Depth

This week, Semiconductor Engineering published:

Two newsletters:

Test, Measurement & Analytics and
Low Power-High Performance

Including 6 top stories:

Catching Critical Defects In TSVs And Stacked Chips
Resistance In Advanced Packages Is Now A System-Level Problem
Chiplets Add More Inspection And Test Steps
UCIe’s Major Technical Components Are Now In Place
Minimum Energy Per Query
Chiplets And 3D-ICs Add New Electrical And Mechanical Challenges

And 1 opinion column:

Silicon Photonics In The Data Center: What A CMOS Exec Needs To Know

More Technologies

The Barcelona Zettascale Lab completed the experimental bring-up of its Cinco Ranch TC1 chip, built on Intel 3nm and based on RISC-V, aimed at advanced computing.

Cisco unveiled its Silicon One G300, comprised of 102.4 Tbps switching silicon, and featuring liquid cooling and supporting high-density optics.

Monogoto and Nordic Semiconductor collaborated to enable developers and device manufacturers to adopt nuSIM-ready designs that embed connectivity directly into the nRF9151 module for IoT devices.

ByteDance is reportedly working on an AI chip and is in discussion with Samsung to manufacture it, per Reuters.

Fundings, Deals, Reports

Deals

• Gelest, a Mitsubishi Chemical subsidiary, is partnering with IBM to test Gelest’s precursor materials for dry resist EUV lithography.
• NXP expanded its use of Arteris’ system IP to enable safe, secure data movement in its SoCs, NPUs, and MCUs for edge AI use cases such as intelligent vehicles, advanced industrial systems, and consumer devices.
• STMicroelectronics struck a deal to supply AWS with high-bandwidth connectivity products, including high-performance mixed-signal processing, advanced microcontrollers, and analog and power ICs.

Funding

• Oxide Computer, manufacturer of on-premises rack-scale data center HW/SW systems, raised $200M.
• ThirdAI raised $3M to deploy its causal AI tools aimed at analytics for IC equipment manufacturers and fabs.
• Apollo is reportedly close to a $3B deal to fund AI chips for Elon Musk’s xAI, per the Information via Reuters.

Reports/Think Tanks

• Soaring memory prices will impact global smartphone production in 2026 (Trendforce).
• Low supply and high prices will push the memory market‘s total worth to ~$552B by 2026, while the global foundry market is expected to reach a new peak of ~$219B (Trendforce).

Opinions

• India to Join Pax Silica Analysis (Eurasia Review)
• GaN Insights 2026 (Infineon)
• Physical AI: A Primer for Policymakers on AI-Robotics (J. VerWey, CSET)
• How Federal Preemption, State AI Laws, & Chip Export Controls Will Shape US Policy (Mondaq)

Security

European cybersecurity agency ENISA published an updated international strategy, aiming to raise cybersecurity levels within the EU and gain international cooperation.

AMD issued a high-severity security bulletin on its Athlon and Ryzen processor platforms that could enable code execution, data tampering, or information disclosure.

CISA published a guide to assist operations technology owners in setting up secure communications. Also, CISA’s latest alerts and advisories are here.

Recently published security papers:

• Cross-Operator Dataflow Optimization for FHE Accelerators (SQZ et al.)
• Mitigating Rowhammer with Randomization & ALERT (Georgia Tech, ETH)
• Protecting 3D Printers Against Acoustic Side-Channel Attacks (Texas A&M)
• FPGA-Based RISC-V Cryptographic Co-Processor for IoT Security (NAIST et al.)
• Blast-Radius-Free Rowhammer Defense (Georgia Tech)
• Dynamic Direct Memory Access Abstraction for Re-hosted Monolithic Firmware Fuzzing (Adelaide U., CSIRO)
• Information Flow Verification at the Pre-silicon Stage Utilizing Static-Formal Methodology (Univ. of Florida)

Research

ETH Zurich‘s paper, “Athena: Synergizing Data Prefetching and Off-Chip Prediction via Online Reinforcement Learning,” won the distinguished artifact award at the recent HPCA conference in Australia.

Fraunhofer Photonic Microsystems developed a chip for measuring pH, addressing a major challenge in chemical sensor technology.

More academic papers:

• High-clockrate free-space optical in-memory computing (Berkeley, USC, TU Berlin)
• Hybrid surface pre-treatments for enhancing copper-to-copper direct bonding (NCHU)
• Imaging a terahertz superfluid plasmon in a 2D superconductor (MIT et al.)
• Ultralow-Backscattering Induced Mode Splitting in Chipscale Valley Photonic Topological Cavities (NTU, Notre Dame)

Trending Video

Rethinking Scan Chains In Semiconductor Test: Finding defects now requires multiple data types, and a much more thorough search.

Universities and Workforce

Purdue University’s Chipshub, in collaboration with Cadence, Synopsys, Siemens, and U.S. government agencies, provides free online access to simulation tools used to design chips for educational purposes on the university’s nanoHUB platform.

The University of Louisiana Lafayette was awarded $5M from the federal government for a Silicon Bayou Semiconductor Training Center and $12M toward an Autonomous Recovery from Cyber Attacks joint research initiative.

Portland State received $2M in funding to further its semiconductor research and educational offerings.

Quantum

Nu Quantum opened a trapped-ion qubit networking lab in Cambridge, UK, to speed up distributed quantum computing.

TU Delft’s QuTech researchers developed a new chip architecture, QARPET (qubit-array research platform for engineering and testing), which could make it easier to test and scale up quantum processors based on semiconductor spin qubits.

AWS published “Reservoir computing on an analog Rydberg-atom quantum computer.”

Quantum-Si announced two papers: “Exploration of Semiconductor Chip-Based Single-Molecule Protein Sequencing for Identification of Hemoglobin Variants” and “Optimization of Quantum-Si Platinum single-molecule protein sequencing platform towards improved complex-matrix protein identification.”

Girls In Quantum is an educational platform that provides free resources to make quantum and other emerging technologies more accessible.

Automotive:

Find Semiconductor Engineering’s automotive and battery news here.

Events and Further Reading

Advantest opened registration for its VOICE 2026 Developer Conference, set for May 18-20 in Scottsdale, Arizona, offering more than 80 technical sessions across 10 tracks, including a new silicon photonics track, plus keynotes, partner showcases and in-depth workshops on test technologies.

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• How Secure Are Your Critical Aerospace & Defense Systems? Feb. 17
• Inline Memory Encryption & MACsec: Protecting Data in Use and in Motion Feb. 19
• Transform Your SI/PI Analysis with Clarity 3D Solver Feb. 19

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Semiconductor Engineering’s complete collection of newsletters for all five channels can be found here.