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

Blog Review: May 1


Cadence's Vatsal Patel stresses the importance of having testing and training capabilities for high-bandwidth memory to prevent the entire SoC from becoming useless and points to key HBM DRAM test instructions through IEEE 1500. In a podcast, Siemens' Stephen V. Chavez chats with Anaya Vardya of American Standard Circuits about the growing significance of high density interconnect and Ultra ... » 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

TSMC Uncorks A16 With Super Power Rail


TSMC showed off its forthcoming A16 process technology node, targeted for the second half of 2026, at its 30th North American Technology Symposium this week. As the foundry moves from nanometer to angstrom process numbering, the new nodes will be prefixed with an “A” designation (instead of “N”) and A16 is the first for TSMC. TSMC said that N2 is still tracking to a 2025 production s... » read more

Blog Review: April 24


Cadence's Vatsal Patel notes the factors that make high-bandwidth memory ideal for AI, such as improved bandwidth and area from vertical stacking and power reduction features like data bus inversion. Synopsys' Rob van Blommestein points to early power network analysis as a way to ensure that enough power is delivered to each transistor to mitigate potential power-related issues within the ch... » 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

Blog Review: April 17


Siemens' Sumit Vishwakarma highlights the importance of crystal oscillators to the proper functioning of many semiconductor devices and applications, from clock signals to transmission and reception of radio waves. Cadence's Jay Domadia introduces some of the new features in GDDR7, such as a semi-independent row and column command address bus and two modes of data signaling, enabling PAM3 fo... » 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

Blog Review: April 10


Cadence's Shyam Sharma looks at the evolution of the LPDDR standard and finds that LPDDR5X is opening new specialized markets for low-power DRAMs beyond the traditional areas of mobile, IoT, and automotive. Siemens' Hossam Sarhan and Dusan Petranovic find that new physical verification approaches are needed to ensure the performance and reliability of superconducting ICs and introduce a hybr... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Jesse Allen, Gregory Haley, and Liz Allan. The Japanese government approved $3.9 billion in funding for chipmaker Rapidus to expand its foundry business, of which 10% will be invested in advanced packaging. This is in addition to the previously announced $2.18 billion in funding. In a meeting next week, the U.S. and Japan are expected to cooperate on increasing semiconductor development a... » read more

← Older posts