Apple security fix; Intel-Tower deal; Synopsys’ AI push; China’s trade violations; chip architecture shift; AMD buys AI Mipsology; TSMC’s photonics bet.
By Liz Allan, Jesse Allen, and Karen Heyman
Global semiconductor equipment billings dipped 2% year-over-year to US$25.8 billion in Q2, and slipped 4% compared with Q1, according to SEMI.
Similarly, the top 10 semiconductor foundries reported a 1.1% quarterly-over-quarter revenue decline in Q2. A rebound is anticipated in Q3, according to TrendForce.
Synopsys extended its AI-driven EDA suite with a data analytics solution that aggregates and utilizes data across IC design, test, and manufacturing flows, as well as into the field. It also enables generative AI methods on data sets to enable new use cases like knowledge assistants, preemptive and prescriptive what-if exploration, and guided issue resolution.
The chair of the House of Representatives’ committee on China asked for an end to all exports to Huawei and SMIC, based on reports of SMIC’s 7nm process technology. Still, it may not be quite the threat it appears. “This does not mean China can manufacture advanced semiconductors at scale,” Paul Triolo, an associate partner for China and technology policy at Albright Stonebridge Group, told the New York Times. “But it shows what incentives U.S. controls have created for Chinese firms to collaborate and attempt new ways to innovate with their existing capabilities.”
Bloomberg reported that SK Hynix opened an investigation into the use of its chips in the latest phone from Huawei, after a teardown of the device revealed its memory and flash storage inside.
Concerns about counterfeit chips are growing as more chips are deployed in safety- and mission-critical applications, prompting better traceability and new and inexpensive solutions that can determine if chips are new or used.
CXL has security issues, according to researchers at University of Cambridge, who wrote a technical paper on CXL’s protection mechanisms and how they handle real-world security problems.
Chipmakers are utilizing both evolutionary and revolutionary technologies to achieve orders of magnitude improvements in performance at the same or lower power. These new approaches, which were unveiled at the recent Hot Chips conference, signal a fundamental shift from process-driven designs to those driven by chip architects.
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Arm announced the launch of its IPO roadshow, aiming to price shares between $47 and $51. Arm applied to list the American depositary shares (ADS) on the Nasdaq Global Select Market as “ARM.”
Silicon Valley-based artificial intelligence chip startup d-Matrix raised $110 million from investors that include Microsoft, Singapore-based Temasek, and venture firm Playground Global.
AMD acquired Mipsology, a developer of AI inference optimization solutions and tools tailored for AMD hardware.
Rambus completed the sale of its SerDes and memory interface PHY IP business to Cadence. Rambus retains its digital IP business, including memory and interface controllers and security IP.
Codasip is now offering Siemens‘ Tessent Enhanced Trace Encoder solution with its customizable RISC-V cores to trace and debug issues between silicon and software.
Sony Semiconductor Solutions developed an energy harvesting module that uses electromagnetic wave noise energy.
For all the advances in semiconductor design, and the astonishing scales on which the industry now works, not much has changed when it comes to standards development. As standards proliferate, industry veterans offer their best practice advice.
Lawrence Pileggi, head and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, will be honored with the 2023 Phil Kaufman Award for his contributions to circuit simulation and optimization.
Intel Foundry Services and Tower Semiconductor announced that Intel will provide foundry services and 300mm manufacturing capacity to Tower. Under the agreement, Tower will invest up to $300 million to acquire and own equipment and other fixed assets to be installed in Intel’s New Mexico facility, opening a new capacity corridor of more than 600,000 photo layers per month.
TSMC is betting big on silicon photonics, as reported by Nikkei Asia. “If we can provide a good silicon photonics integration system, we can address both critical issues of energy efficiency and computing power [performance] for AI,” said Douglas Yu, vice president of pathfinding for system integration at TSMC. “This is going to be a new paradigm shift. We may be at the beginning of a new era.”
NIST issued a “Request for Information” looking for input on implementation of the U.S. Government National Standards Strategy for Critical and Emerging Technology.
Despite a slowdown for Moore’s Law, there are more new manufacturing processes are rolling out faster than ever before. Here are the various steps involved in determining what can be printed on a wafer, how to reduce defect density, and what other concerns need to be addressed to ramp a new process.
PDF Solutions announced a freemium entry point for its Exensio Analytics Platform, providing users a new way to experience the analytics platform.
American Battery Technology Company (ABTC) has achieved targeted core drilling depth of 1,430 feet, one of the deepest lithium sampling areas in Smoky Valley, as part of its third drill program aimed to advance its Tonopah Flats Lithium Project.
The shift toward software-defined vehicles (SDVs), EVs, and autonomous vehicles (AVs) is proving the value and exposing the weaknesses in simulating individual components and designing complete vehicles virtually.
At the Munich IAA Mobility show:
Fraunhofer, Infineon, and others presented research results from the KI-FLEX project built around a high-performance, energy-efficient, flexible hardware platform with a software framework, using AI to process and fuse data from various sensors, allowing vehicles to perceive and localize environmental stimuli in a fast, efficient, and reliable manner.
Ansys partnered with Formula One (F1) on a global schools competitions for students to design, build, test, and race miniature F1 cars using Ansys’ computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solutions to unlock engineering insights and gain workforce skills.
The micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) market is expected to grow from US$14.5 billion in 2022 to US$20 billion in 2028, at an annual growth rate of 5%, according to Yole. Key drivers are automotive autonomous and advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) features, micromirrors for LiDAR, and environmental and inertial sensors; the telecom market as it meets exponential rise in data demand; and consumer wearables.
Apple released security updates to fix zero-day vulnerabilities in iPhones, iPads, Apple watches and Macs. Find out if your device is impacted and update now.
As automotive technologies evolve, new vulnerabilities arise and intrusion detection becomes paramount, according to researchers at TU Denmark.
CISA issued numerous alerts including actionable guidance for federal agencies to evaluate and mitigate the risk of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against websites and web services.
CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the U.S. Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF) published a joint advisory about remote code execution on the Zoho ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus application, affecting an aeronautical organization.
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