Chip Industry Week In Review


Absolics, an affiliate of Korea materials company SKC, will receive up to $75 million in direct funding under the U.S. CHIPS Act for the construction of a 120,000 square-foot facility in Covington, Georgia, for glass substrates in advanced packaging. imec will host a €2.5 billion (~$2.72B) pilot line for researching chips beyond 2nm, partially funded through the EU Chips Act. imec CEO Luc ... » read more

Chip Aging Becoming Key Factor In Data Center Economics


Chip aging is becoming a much bigger concern inside of data centers, where it can impact server uptime, utilization rates, and the amount of energy needed to drive signals and cool entire server racks. Aging in chips is the result of both higher logic utilization and increasing transistor density. This is problematic for data centers, in general, but especially for AI chips where digital log... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


President Biden will raise the tariff rate on Chinese semiconductors from 25% to 50% by 2025, among other measures to protect U.S. businesses from China’s trade practices. Also, as part of President Biden’s AI Executive Order, the Administration released steps to protect workers from AI risks, including human oversight of systems and transparency about what systems are being used. Intel ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Synopsys refocused its security priorities around chips, striking a deal to sell off its Software Integrity Group subsidiary to private equity firms Clearlake Capital Group and Francisco Partners for about $2.1 billion. That deal comes on the heels of Synopsys' recent acquisition of Intrinsic ID, which develops physical unclonable function IP. Sassine Ghazi, Synopsys' president and CEO, said in... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Samsung and Synopsys collaborated on the first production tapeout of a high-performance mobile SoC design, including CPUs and GPUs, using the Synopsys.ai EDA suite on Samsung Foundry's gate-all-around (GAA) process. Samsung plans to begin mass production of 2nm process GAA chips in 2025, reports BusinessKorea. UMC developed the first radio frequency silicon on insulator (RF-SOI)-based 3D IC ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


President Biden announced four new Workforce Hubs to support the CHIPS Act and other initiatives, in Upstate New York, Michigan, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. The White House also provided economic context and progress updates for the President’s workforce strategy. Samsung began mass production of its ninth-gen industry-first V-NAND chip. Along with one-terabit triple-level cell design, th... » read more

EDA Looks Beyond Chips


Large EDA companies are looking at huge new opportunities that reach well beyond semiconductors, combining large-scale multi-physics simulations with methodologies and tools that were developed for chips. Top EDA executives have been talking about expanding into adjacent markets for more than a decade, but the broader markets were largely closed to them. In fact, the only significant step in... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


SK hynix and TSMC plan to collaborate on HBM4 development and next-generation packaging technology, with plans to mass produce HBM4 chips in 2026. The agreement is an early indicator for just how competitive, and potentially lucrative, the HBM market is becoming. SK hynix said the collaboration will enable breakthroughs in memory performance with increased density of the memory controller at t... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Applied Materials may scale back or cancel its $4 billion new Silicon Valley R&D facility in light of the U.S. government's recent announcement to reduce funding for construction, modernization, or expansion of semiconductor research and development (R&D) facilities in the United States, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. TSMC could receive up to $6.6 billion in direct funding... » read more

Startup Funding: March 2024


The challenge of moving data from place to place is increasingly a key concern for chip and system designers, and investors are taking note. Numerous startups developing interconnect technologies received significant backing in March, with approaches spanning chiplet-enabling PHYs, photonic fabrics for disaggregated compute and memory, and telecom transceiver modules. Several new startups la... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →