Chip Industry Week in Review


Government funding/defunding NIST is terminating funding for the SMART USA Institute, a CHIPS Act research center focused on digital twins, prompting congressional concern that the decision disrupts active awards and weakens U.S. semiconductor R&D commitments. Korea Zinc was awarded $210M in CHIPS Act funding towards a new $6.6B Tennessee advanced smelter and minerals processing facility,... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 17


Cadence's Shyam Sharma checks out what's new in the latest Open NAND Flash Interface 5.2 standard, including a Separate Command Address protocol that allows Hosts to optimize the command and data scheduling to increase overall available bandwidth. Siemens' Kyle Fraunfelter and Melville Bryant contend that improving semiconductor manufacturing and fab sustainability starts with a digital twin... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Deals of the week: Arteris announced plans to acquire cybersecurity provider Cycuity. “Expanding our technology portfolio to include Cycuity’s hardware security assurance products will enable our customers to achieve secure on-chip data movement,” said Charlie Janac, chairman and CEO of Arteris. Qualcomm acquired Ventana Micro Systems, a maker of RISC-V data center-class CPU IP. ... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Major Deals: Taiwan-based UMC is exploring possible collaboration with Polar Semiconductor for high-volume production of 8-inch wafers at Polar’s expanded Minnesota fab, a move that could provide domestic manufacturing capacity for automotive, data center, consumer, aerospace, and defense customers. Marvell will acquire Celestial AI for $3.25B, adding photonic fabric technology for o... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 3


Cadence's Reela Samuel notes that as multi-die integration becomes the new engine of semiconductor performance, the decision between 2.5D and 3D-IC architectures shapes a design's achievable bandwidth, energy efficiency, thermal limits, system size, and even program schedules. Synopsys' Thomas Andersen suggests that the deployment of physical AI will require the fusion of advanced electronic... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Breaking news: Nvidia and Synopsys announced a multi-faceted, multi-year deal that includes everything from digital twins to CUDA programming, engineering, and marketing collaboration, and Nvidia's $2B purchase of Synopsys stock. [Updated 12/1] Memory news: Micron is building a $9.6B HBM facility in the city of Higashi-Hiroshima Japan, reports Nikkei. China's ChangXin Memory Technol... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 26


Cadence's Rajneesh Chauhan explains CXL's low power state, L0p, which maintains partial lane activity for efficient power management without compromising performance, and how comprehensive verification can help ensure reliable implementation. Siemens' John Ferguson provides a brief history of design rule checking, major advancements over the years, and why introducing it in earlier design st... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


China's Hefei Lumiverse Technology reportedly has developed a desktop-sized High Harmonic Generation light source that generates wavelengths as small as 1nm. One customer already has used it to produce 14nm chips, which was the original target node for EUV, according to one report. As a point of comparison, TSMC and Samsung didn't start using EUV until the 7nm node, relying instead on immersion... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 19


Cadence's Mamta Rana explores how Forward Error Correction in PCIe 6.0 is key to its 64.0 GT/s per lane bandwidth by enabling the receiver to detect and correct errors without retransmissions or protocol-level recovery by adding redundant information to transmitted data. Siemens' Dave Rich shares a paper from DVCon 1992 that introduced a new RTL modeling construct to Verilog, eventually know... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Samsung reportedly is hiking memory chip prices by 30% to 60% due to high demand from AI data centers and constrained supplies. Those shortages are causing ripples elsewhere. SMIC, China's largest foundry, said its customers are holding back orders for other types of semiconductor due to concerns about memory supplies. Meanwhile, interest in photonics and power semiconductors is picking up, ... » read more

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