Chip Industry Week in Review

Amkor, TSMC, and Cadence partnered with Tesoro VC, which will serve as the lead operator of a new Global AI + Semiconductor Startup Hub and a Global Design Center in Phoenix, Arizona, aimed at chip innovation, startup growth, and advanced manufacturing.

Nvidia will invest $5 billion in Intel common stock at a purchase price of $23.28 per share and the companies will collaborate on AI infrastructure and PC products, connecting their architectures using NVLink. For data centers, Intel will build custom x86 CPUs for Nvidia to integrate into its platforms and offer to the market. For PCs, Intel will build and offer to the market x86 SoCs that integrate Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets.

Samsung Austin Semiconductor won a Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund (TSIF) grant of $250 million for its leading edge logic fab in Taylor, Texas. And in Austin, La Luce Cristallina opened a new facility for wafer-scale fabrication of crystal-on-glass BaTiO₃ substrates, and began offering a 200mm barium titanate wafer for photonics applications.

MediaTek taped out a flagship SoC on TSMC‘s N2P 2nm process. Volume production is expected late next year.

Siemens Digital Industries Software introduced an automated DFT solution for analog circuitry in ICs to reduce pattern generation time for analog circuit tests and verify the analog test flow and defect coverage for algorithmic trimming, top-up parametric tests, or ISO 26262 functional safety metrics. onsemi noted using the tool.

Fig. 1: A chip concept for Tessent AnalogTest. Source: Siemens EDA

Chip wars:

• On Friday, the U.S. Commerce Department placed two Chinese chipmakers on the so-called Entity List, barring GMC Semiconductor Technology and Jicun Semiconductor Technology from purchasing US semiconductor technology.
• The Chinese government accused Nvidia of violating anti-monopoly laws after it acquired Mellanox. Nvidia disputes the characterization, saying it complies with the law.
• The Cyberspace Administration of China instructed tech companies not to buy Nvidia‘s China-specific AI chip, reported CNBC via the Financial Times.
• Huawei plans to roll out new variants of its AI chip at a rapid pace.
• China began an anti-dumping investigation into some analog chips, including interface and gate driver ICs, imported from U.S. companies.

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Reports, Deals and Money
Product News
Security
Research
Automotive
Quantum
Education and Training
Events and Further Reading

Global

Asia/Middle East:

• Japan will provide Micron Technology with 536 billion yen (~$3.6B) for R&D and expansion of its Hiroshima plant, per Nikkei.
• X-FAB opened a new $600 million manufacturing line for its 180nm BCD-on-SOI technology in Sarawak, Malaysia.
• Panasonic Industry plans to construct a new 17 billion yen (~$115M) manufacturing facility for multi-layer circuit board materials in Ayutthaya, Thailand.
• At SEMICON Taiwan, SEMI launched the 3DIC Advanced Manufacturing Alliance, co-chaired by TSMC and ASE, to support cross-disciplinary collaboration and standardization throughout the 3D-IC ecosystem.

Europe:

• The European Semiconductor Industry Association published a position paper on the proposed EU Chips Act 2.
• STMicroelectronics is building a $60 million panel-level packaging pilot line in Tours, France, expected to be operational in Q3 2026.
• Brookings’ Brooke Tanner and Andrew W. Wyckoff make the case for a third AI technology stack, including reasons such as digital sovereignty and diversification in the market.

Americas:

• CSIS identified critical areas to strengthen the execution of the U.S. AI Action Plan. Areas include the need for skilled trade labor, the geographic distribution of data centers, and the design of the AI Export Package.
• The U.S. Department of Energy will make up to $6 million available for gallium recovery from metal processing feedstocks.
• Oxford Quantum Circuits, Digital Realty, and Nvidia plan to build a data center in New York City that integrates superconducting quantum computers and AI supercomputing.

In-Depth 

Semiconductor Engineering published its Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:

• Special Report: Glass Substrates Gain Momentum
• Precision Under Pressure: Managing Materials Complexity In Advanced Packaging
• Scaling Memory With Molybdenum

More reporting this week:

• New Demands For IP Reuse
• New Antennas And Advanced ICs Needed For 6G
• Video: Virtual Twins: Layers Of Challenges

Reports, Deals and Money

Altera finalized its spin-out from Intel, with investment firm Silver Lake acquiring 51% of the FPGA maker. Intel will retain a 49% stake.

NVIDIA partnered with Nscale, CoreWeave and others to scale up UK AI factories with up to 120,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and up to £11 billion to power initiatives such as OpenAI’s Stargate U.K.

More deals:

• Lam Research and JSR Corporation inked a cross-licensing and collaboration agreement that will see JSR/Inpria’s patterning resists and films integrated with Lam’s etch and dry resist deposition technologies.
• LA Semiconductor intends to sell its wafer fabrication facility for 0.18µm to 1.5µm analog, digital, and mixed-signal products, located in Pocatello, Idaho.
• Cohu expects its HBM revenue to be $10 to $11 million in 2025 thanks to new orders for its HBM inspection and metrology system.
• Qatar will invest $54 million in Tekscend Photomasks as it prepares for an IPO.
• Infineon entered into a definitive agreement to transfer its backend manufacturing site in Bangkok/Nonthaburi Thailand to Malaysian Pacific Industries Berhad.
• The Management Board of Infineon, with the approval of the Supervisory Board, resolved to acquire up to 750,000 shares via the stock exchange at a total purchase price of up to €37 million.

Funding:

• Groq raised $750 million for its AI inference-focused language processing unit (LPU) architecture and accompanying AI cloud and server infrastructure.
• Upscale AI launched with $100 million in funding for its suite of AI networking silicon, systems, and software based on open standards.
• Omni Design Technologies raised over $35 million for its wideband signal conversion and processing IP and chiplets.
• Mueon emerged from stealth with $15.5 million in funding for modular units that integrate compute, memory, power delivery, and thermal management for quick deployment of AI infrastructure.
• Luminary Cloud raised $72 million for its physics-based AI models to predict the performance of cars, aircraft, and electronics.
• Agate Sensors raised €5.6 million (~$6.6M) to produce chip-scale spectral sensors for material analysis.

Market reports:

• In its latest semiconductor outlook, Morningstar anticipates that AI chip revenue will increase roughly four times over the next several years, making AI the largest growth driver in the semiconductor industry.
• Counterpoint Research found that the broad foundry market revenue rose 19% YoY in Q2 2025. This encompasses pure-play foundry (up 33% YoY in Q2 2025), non-memory IDM (up 2%), OSAT (up 11%), and photomask making vendors (up 10%).
• The AI glasses market is expected to increase by 158%, reaching 5.1 million units globally in 2025, according to Omdia.

Other Reports: Wet Chemical

Product News

Design and power:

• Axiomise unveiled an end-to-end sign-off solution for floating-point hardware that uses compositional formal methods to achieve higher proof convergence.
• Silicon Catalyst startups now have access to Synopsys EDA tools and IP through Synopsys Cloud.
• Ambient Scientific announced an edge AI SoC that enables a neural network model’s matrix-multiply operations and activation flows to be mapped directly to in-memory analog compute blocks.
• SiTime uncorked a family of MEMS resonators for small, battery-powered, connected devices.
• Nordic Semiconductor announced a high-memory wireless SoC for Bluetooth LE and Matter applications.
• The Orange Pi RV2, an SBC, has an 8-core RISC-V processor and connectivity options, and starts at $40.
• Alpha and Omega Semiconductor announced two Type-C sink and source protection switches, designed to increase the power delivery capability of USB Type-C ports to 240W.

Optical and photonics:

• Oprocessor developed an ultra-low loss VCSEL-based photonic interposer that supports 200 Gb/s per lane.
• Optical computing company LightSolver used a 2D grid of coupled lasers to directly map partial differential equations onto its Laser Processing Unit (LPU), enabling it to model physical phenomena.

Manufacturing:

• Advantest introduced a single test rack system-level test and burn-in test solution with a lower-cost architecture optimized for slot-based automated test solutions in mid- to low-volume production environments.
• Siemens added AI-powered lifecycle assessment capabilities developed in collaboration with Makersite to its product lifecycle management software.
• Scia Systems released a modular ion beam and plasma processing system with up to five process chambers for coating, etching, and cleaning processes.
• La Luce Cristallina began offering a 200mm barium titanate (BaTiO₃) wafer for photonics applications and opened a new fabrication facility in Austin, Texas, for wafer-scale fabrication of crystal-on-glass BaTiO₃ substrates.
• ACM Research announced an electrochemical deplating tool for wafer-level gold etching in compound semiconductor manufacturing.
• Tektronix debuted a low noise, high ENOB oscilloscope with a signal path architecture that combines custom ASICs, optimized FPGAs, and a high-performance GPU. The company also introduced a modular precision test system that combines source measure units and programmable power supply units within a compact 1U mainframe.
• Axcelis Technologies debuted an ion implant platform for SiC power devices as well as a high current ion implanter for engineered substrates.
• ASMPT Semiconductor Solutions launched a new laser dicing and grooving system for bare wafer with multi-beam laser processing technology and fully automated film frame and bare wafer handling.
• Kulicke & Soffa launched a new precision dispensing solution for semiconductor, SMT, and automotive assembly applications.

Security

Rowhammer:

• ETH Zurich researchers used Phoenix to demonstrate that all DDR5 devices from SK hynix are still vulnerable to a new variant of Rowhammer attacks.
• Google’s Daniel Moghimi talks about supporting Rowhammer research to protect the DRAM ecosystem.

Research:

• Integration of Hardware Security Modules into BLE Beacons: Fundamentals and use in a secure and private geofencing application (Infineon, Univ. of Granada, Univ. of Almeria)
• ToolRAG: A Novel Approach to the Detection of Code Vulnerabilities Through Large Language Models (Texas A&M)
• Jailbreaking Large Language Models Through Content Concretization (Networked Systems Security Group, KTH Royal Institute of Technology)

CISA issued new alerts/advisories.

Research

AI systems:

• Intel researchers published “BiFrost: A Composable, Resilient Interconnect Network Architecture for Scalable AI Systems.”
• IBM researchers developed the RequirementAgent from the BeeAI Framework, providing reliability for production scenarios in multi-agent systems.
• imec’s Axel Nackaerts did a podcast on why hardware innovation will be crucial to the future of AI application development.

Materials and light:

• Institute of Science Tokyo researchers synthesized 2H-NbO₂, a novel van der Waals oxide that exhibits strongly correlated electronic properties with two-dimensional flexibility.
• CEA-Leti and the Centre for Research on Heteroepitaxy and its Applications (CRHEA) developed a technique for growing high-quality InGaN-based quantum wells on sub-micron nanopyramids, enabling native emission of RGB light from a single material system, aimed at AR/VR.
• Caltech researchers designed a nanoscale optical parametric oscillator that can produce a wide range of laser-light frequencies with ultra-high efficiency.

Automotive

Key topics at the 2025 IAA Mobility Conference included the ADAS and autonomous driving industry shifting toward mass-market solutions; hardware, software, and AI model convergence for safer, smarter driving; and high-performance sensors, per Counterpoint.

EVs and autonomous driving:

• Waymo received its permit to operate at San Francisco International Airport, per the SF Standard.
• Rivian broke ground at a new manufacturing site outside of Social Circle, Georgia, with customer vehicle production expected to begin in 2028.
• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into possible Tesla door defects, possibly due to insufficient voltage. Parents reported their children became trapped in the back seat and they had to break windows to get them out.

Infineon expanded its collaboration with Goldwind Science & Technology and will supply the company with power modules to enhance energy efficiency in wind turbines.

Quantum

IonQ completed its $1+ billion acquisition of Oxford Ionics, which makes ion-trap quantum processors on standard semiconductor chips. IonQ also plans to acquire Vector Atomic, a maker of quantum sensors for positioning, navigation, and timing.

The State University of New York at Stony Brook will receive $300 million from New York State to establish a quantum research hub.

The MiQro Innovation Collaborative Centre and Anyon Systems signed an MoU to collaborate on a superconducting quantum chip fab in Bromont, Québec.

Infleqtion detailed its new neutral-atom quantum architecture and roadmap to build a full-stack fault-tolerant system with more than 1,000 logical qubits by 2030.

Quantum Motion deployed a silicon spin‑qubit quantum computer built using a standard silicon CMOS chip fabrication process at the UK National Quantum Computing Centre.

Jülich Supercomputing Centre is expanding into hybrid quantum-classical computing, combining solutions from Nvidia, Quantum Machines, and Arque Systems to accelerate scientific research and industrial applications.

Riverlane launched an open-source software platform for quantum error correction.

Education and Training

Phortify, a European photonics education and training network, launched with €5 million (~$5.9M) from the European Commission.

UCLA Samueli School of Engineering highlighted the Semiconductor Microelectronics Training Program it offers with the California NanoSystems Institute to prepare the next generation of engineers and scientists through hands-on training.

Boise State University secured $7.4 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation to fund the creation of ‘AWESOME’, the Center for Advancing Workforce Experience through Semiconductors, Outreach, and Mentoring Excellence.

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• • 2025 Semiconductor Supply Chain Survey (SEMI, McKinsey) (September 23)
  • 448G PAM4: The Future of 3.2T Data Centers (September 24)
  • Static Verification of RTL DFT Connectivity – Getting it Right the First Time (September 25)
  • Getting Started with the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) for Secure Product Development and Compliance (September 25)

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

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