Chip Industry Week in Review


[Editor's Note: Early edition due to the U.S. July 4th holiday.] The U.S. government lifted export restrictions that barred Synopsys, Siemens EDA, and Cadence from selling EDA tools to China. In a statement, Synopsys said it received a letter from the U.S. Commerce Department immediately rescinding those restrictions. Siemens issued a similar statement. Which tools or hardware accelerated t... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


AI featured big at this week's Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco. Dozens of companies featured AI-related tools (see product section below), as well as significant improvements to existing tools and some entirely new approaches for designing chips. Among the highlights: Siemens unveiled an AI-enhanced toolset for the EDA design flow that enables customers to integrate the... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Texas Instruments will invest more than $60 billion to build and expand seven semiconductor fabs in Texas and Utah, supporting more than 60,000 U.S. jobs. Chinese automakers — including SAIC Motor, Changan, Great Wall Motor, BYD, Li Auto and Geely — are aiming to launch new models with 100% homemade chips, some as early as 2026, reports Nikkei Asia. Marvell introduced 2nm custom SRAM ... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The Chinese Academy of Sciences unveiled a fully automated processor chip design system, claiming the potential to accelerate semiconductor development and replace human programmers. Micron Technology plans to expand its U.S. investments to approximately $150 billion in domestic memory manufacturing and $50 billion in R&D, which is $30 billion higher than previously reported. AMD laun... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Qualcomm announced plans to buy Alphawave Semi for ~$2.4 billion in a deal expected to close in Q1 2026. Qualcomm plans to leverage Alphawave Semi's connectivity products, including chiplets, to develop high-performance, low-power solutions for AI inferencing and customized CPUs in data centers. Qualcomm's traditional targets were mobile phones and edge computing. [Updated 6/9.] Global semic... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The U.S. Commerce Department is tightening controls on EDA software sold to China by imposing additional license requirements. EDA companies are assessing the impact. Details on how broad the restrictions will be are still pending. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will require Synopsys and Ansys to divest key software assets — including optical, photonic, and RTL power analysis tool... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Podcast: imec's roadmap and a one-on-one interview with the European research house's chief strategy officer. China's Xiaomi debuted an in-house-designed 10-core mobile SoC built on a 3nm process. The company did not identify the foundry. It also announced plans to invest 50 billion yuan (~$7B) over the next decade to develop high-end smartphone chips, as part of a 200 billion yuan (~$28B) c... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Check out the Inside Chips podcast for our behind-the-scenes analysis. Newly proposed U.S. legislation called the Chip Security Act would use location verification tracking as a tool to help combat chip smuggling. This follows a report by the Economist that showed Taiwan exports of advanced chips to Malaysia in the first quarter has nearly reached 2024 totals, heightening concerns that China... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Check out the Inside Chips podcast for our behind-the-scenes analysis. The U.S. government is rescinding a Biden-era AI export rule that would have imposed complex restrictions on how U.S. chip and AI technology is sold abroad, a move welcomed by companies like Nvidia, reports Bloomberg. While new, simpler guidelines are expected in the coming months, the decision introduces short-term uncer... » read more

Who Is Most Likely To Link Financial And Manufacturing Data?


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss which companies have the most to gain from linking financial data with manufacturing data analytics platforms with Dieter Rathei, CEO of DR Yield; Jon Holt, senior director of product management at PDF Solutions, Alex Burlak, vice president of advanced analytics and test at proteanTecs; and Dirk de Vries, technical program ma... » read more

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