Chip Industry Week in Review

Retaliations and countermoves leading up to planned trade talks between the U.S. and China led experts to wonder, ‘Who’s winning?’ New activity on this front:

• China issued questionnaires to some U.S. semiconductor firms as part of an anti-dumping probe, demanding detailed data on sales, profit margins, logistics costs and Chinese customer names for analog chips. The probe appears aimed at Texas Instruments and Analog Devices.
• The U.S. and Australia inked an agreement to shore up the supply of critical minerals and rare earths.  The deal includes a joint investment of at least US$2B in mines and processing operations, including support for an Alcoa -led gallium plant in Western Australia that could supply up to 10 % of global gallium demand (CSIS breaks down the deal here.)
• Think tank IFP offered a roadmap to quickly counter China’s rare earths monopoly.
• A China-based unit of Dutch chipmaker Nexperia resumed semiconductor sales to local distributors in that country, but China’s export ban remains in place, and all transactions now must be settled in yuan. Nexperia’s Dutch parent, under temporary control by the Netherlands government, has cautioned Chinese customers that it cannot guarantee the quality of chips supplied by the Chinese unit.

ASE plans to acquire Analog Devices’ 680,000 square-foot facility in Penang, Malaysia. In addition, ADI and ASE will co-invest in the site and enter a long-term supply agreement.

NVIDIA and TSMC unveiled the first Blackwell wafer manufactured at TSMC’s Arizona fab. The plan is to manufacture chips from 4nm to 14 angstroms. But for now, wafers still must be shipped back to Taiwan for final packaging.

Anthropic plans to expand its use of Google cloud technologies and will access up to a million TPUs to increase its compute capacity to over a gigawatt of capacity online in 2026.

The National Network for Microelectronics Education, operated by the SEMI Foundation, launched ChipPath, a new AI-enabled career platform designed to address the talent gap in the U.S. semiconductor industry. The platform has over 90,000 live job postings. SEMI also released the Standardized Semiconductor Cyber Assessment, a checklist meant to assist device makers, equipment suppliers, software suppliers and other members of the global manufacturing value chain in evaluating cyber readiness and risk.

Financial updates this week: Intel Corporation, Lam Research, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Instruments. Plus, Applied Materials will lay off 4% of its workforce, cutting about 1,400 jobs, reports Reuters.

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Market and Deals
New Technologies
Security
Automotive
Research
Education and Training
Quantum
Events and Further Reading

Global

Americas:

• Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Samsung Electronics will take a larger role in manufacturing the company’s upcoming AI5 chip, ending sole reliance on TSMC, reports Bloomberg.
• CSIS warns the proposed GAIN AI Act, which prioritizes U.S. customers’ access to AI chips, will likely do more harm than good.
• New Mexico State University and Fujitsu will jointly establish a national testbed for high-performance and edge computing technology.
• The proposed 30% tariffs on electronics imports from Mexico “would fracture North American supply chains, raise costs for U.S. manufacturers, and undermine efforts to re-shore production and strengthen domestic competitiveness,” warns the Global Electronics Association.

Europe:

• The National Cyber  Security  Centre issued a sobering annual review of the cybersecurity issues facing the UK and highlighted the need to act.
• The Flanders Chips Competence Center “FC3” opened in Belgium.
• Argyll Data Development partnered with SambaNova to deliver the UK’s first renewable-powered AI inference cloud, harnessing wind, wave, and solar energy generated on-site in Scotland.

Asia:

• India provided a factsheet on its indigenous 7nm processor currently under development by IIT Madras.
• Taiwan plans to build a national silicon photonics hub in Kaohsiung.
• US-based Tachyum opened new offices in Taiwan, ahead of taping out its Prodigy Universal Processor.
• Rigaku established a new engineering base in Taiwan and begins full-scale operation this month.
• Pakistan launched its “Initiative to Nurture Semiconductor Professionals for Industry, Research & Education” (INSPIRE) to train 7,200 people in design and research.

In-Depth

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

• Digital Twins For Packaging: Bridging Design, Fab, Test, And Reliability
• Powering Efficiency: AI Transforms IC Manufacturing As ICs Fuel AI
• Why In-Memory Computation Is So Important For Edge AI

More reporting this week:

• Special Report: Multiple Challenges Emerge With Physical AI System Design
• Opinion: AI Bubble Or Boom?
• Video: In-System Test For AI Data Centers

Market and Deals

Funding:

• ChipAgents closed a $21M Series A round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with strategic backing from Micron, MediaTek, Ericsson, and more, to expand its agentic AI solution for chip design and verification.
• Chipmind emerged from stealth mode with $2.5M for its AI agents to speed up chip design.
• Bengaluru-based Maieutic Semiconductor raised $6M for its GenAI copilot for analog chip design, following $4.15M seed funding.

Acquisitions/listings:

• Astera Labs plans to acquire aiXscale Photonics to help develop photonic scale-up solutions by combining the latter’s fiber-chip coupling technologies with Astera Labs’ connectivity and signal processing portfolio.
• Chinese chipmaker CXMT plans a Shanghai listing with $42 billion valuation, per SCMP.

Deals:

• IBM and Groq partnered on enterprise AI deployment, with plans to integrate and enhance Red Hat open source vLLM technology with Groq’s LPU architecture.
• Arteris expanded its collaboration with Alibaba DAMO Academy’s XuanTie, a RISC-V CPU IP provider, accelerating chiplet and SoC design innovation and time-to-market for joint customers.

Reports:

• Bain issued its global data center forecast, predicting U.S. data centers could consume about 9% of the country’s total electricity by 2030.
• Glass-core substrates and glass interposers are emerging as major growth engines in advanced packaging, driven by demand from AI, HPC, and communication markets, reports Yole Group.

Trending Video

What’s Different About HBM4: New DRAM standard aims to solve a critical bottleneck.

New Technologies

UMC introduced a 55nm bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) platform designed to enhance power efficiency and performance in consumer electronics, automotive, and industrial devices. The new platform offers three process variants — non-EPI for cost-effective mobile/consumer designs, EPI supporting up to 150 V and meeting AEC-Q100 Grade 0 automotive standards, and SOI for high-grade automotive/industrial use with AEC-Q100 Grade 1 compliance.

Arm added the Armv9 edge AI platform for IoT and edge AI workloads to the Arm Flexible Access Program, which gives partners upfront low- or no-cost access to certain technology, tools, and resources. Its Cortex-A320 CPU will be available through Arm Flexible Access in November 2025, with Ethos-U85 to follow in early 2026. Arm also announced the general availability of ExecuTorch 1.0, which deploys PyTorch models across billions of Arm-based edge devices for private on‑device AI assistants and voice interfaces.

Infineon launched an integrated development environment to streamline the development of applications for AURIX TC3x devices. Infineon also launched the industry’s first rad-hard buck controller with an integrated gate drive, designed for point-of-load power rails in commercial space systems and other extreme environments. In addition, the company introduced high-accuracy magnetic coreless current sensors with a 0.7% total error rate.

Samsung unveiled its Galaxy XR headset, built on an open, scalable platform with multimodal AI at its core. This marks the first product built on the Android XR platform, developed by Samsung, Google and Qualcomm.

2V Systems licensed Arteris’ Ncore 3 cache coherent interconnect IP and FlexNoC 5 non-coherent interconnect IP for its server I/O chiplet, to be used in multi-die, RISC-V-based SoCs for data centers.

Standards and frameworks:

• JEDEC is nearing completion of the JESD328: LPDDR5/5X Small Outline Compression Attached Memory Module (SOCAMM2) Common Standard, for low-profile LPDRAM modules aimed at AI data center applications.

Software updates:

• Cadence released Virtuoso Studio IC25.1, automating tracing matching nets with a multi-physics analysis assistant, compressed S-parameter files, and enhancements in LVS-based binding for analog layout migration.
• Siemens EDA updated its Designcenter Solid Edge software with new AI capabilities for design workflows, intelligent assembly, drawing generation, and documentation accuracy, along with a conversational assistant.

AI chips:

• Axelera AI released Europa, an AI processor unit for multi-user generative AI and computer vision applications, and licensed Arteris’ FlexNoC 5 interconnect IP for that platform.
• France-based VSORA taped out Jotunn8, an AI inference chip for data centers at scale, less than six months after raising €40 million. It aims to address the memory bottleneck with 288 GB HBM3e memory and 3,200 Tflops of compute power.
• NextSilicon disclosed details for Maverick-2, a next-gen HPC and AI chip, claiming 10X performance at 60% less power compared with other GPUs. The company also released Arbel, an enterprise-grade, high-performance RISC-V core built on TSMC’s 5nm process.

Security

Texas A&M researchers developed a tool to detect stealth cyberattacks on critical infrastructure like power grids and water systems. The RADIANT system mitigates adversarial threats without relying on retraining.

Infineon introduced two new secure prepaid tag solutions to help card issuers increase the security of gift cards. The technology replaces the need for visible codes, barcodes, or magnetic stripes with a secure chip using cryptographic mechanisms.

Keysight conducted an in-depth assessment of firmware security and hardware interactions that enabled SK hynix to earn Open Compute Project (OCP) Security Appraisal Framework and Enablement (S.A.F.E.) recognition for a solid-state drive.

Research:

• Understanding Column-based Read Disturbance in Real DRAM Chips and Implications for Future Systems (ETH, CISPA)
• A Microarchitectural Defense Strategy against Electromagnetic Side-Channel Attacks in Microprocessors (Northeastern et al.)
• sNVMe-oF: Secure and Efficient Disaggregated Storage (ETH Zurich, NVIDIA et al.)
• Citadel: Rethinking Memory Allocation to Safeguard Against Inter-Domain Rowhammer Exploits (Georgia Tech)
• FHE-SQL: Fully Homomorphic Encrypted SQL Database (National Taiwan Univ., FHEngine)

CISA issued new alerts/advisories.

Automotive

New technology:

• General Motors will launch a centralized computing platform and next-generation electrical architecture across electric and gas-powered vehicles, starting with Cadillac’s ESCALADE IQ in 2028.
• The Geely EX5, powered by Arm Automotive Enhanced technologies, is coming to the UK. At the core of the vehicle is Arm’s SE1000 SoC, which integrates Arm Cortex-A CPUs for application processing, control and safety functions, high-fidelity graphics, camera-based intelligence, screen integration, and more.
• ​​​​​​​​​​​Soitec and CEA-Leti partnered to advance automotive cybersecurity with FD-SOI technology​​, which offers remote hacking protection due to its buried oxide layer.

Reports and Mobility Research:

• Georgia Tech researchers analyze the future of advanced air mobility, citing safety, regulation, and public acceptance as barriers to adoption.
• Yole Group analyzes the technological and market forces redefining vehicle intelligence, safety, and connectivity in Automotive Computing and AI 2025. The report covers the evolution of ADAS and Infotainment platforms, sensor fusion, and the integration of AI accelerators across the vehicle.

Industry News:

• Tesla recalled almost 13,000 vehicles in the U.S. due to a defect in a battery pack component that could lead to a sudden loss of drive power, according to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
• The Automotive Chiplet Forum coincided with the official inauguration of imec’s new Baden-Württemberg office in Heilbronn. The ACF also highlighted imec’s new Advanced Chip Design Accelerator competence center.

Research

Penn State-led researchers were awarded $340,000 from the NSF to improve the cooling efficiency and resilience of data centers.

South Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) reported an ultra-small hybrid low-dropout regulator for power management in advanced semiconductor devices, which stabilizes voltage more effectively and also filters out noise, for high-performance SoCs in AI and 6G communications.

An international team, including EPFL researchers, created a new way of building computers to address the increasing challenges faced by data centers. They compartmentalized virtual memory so that programs can quickly find their workspace, and hardware can perform access checks with little delay or energy.

More research:

• 3D integrated hybrid complementary circuits for large-area electronics (KAUST et al.)
• Efficient Operator Learning for Fast and Trustworthy Thermal Simulation and Optimization in 3D-IC Design (Intel et al.)
• Thermal conductivity of boron arsenide above 2100 W per meter per Kelvin at room temperature (U. of Houston, UCSB et al.)
• Inner Gate Length Modulation of MFMIS Nanosheet FET Memory for Advanced Technology Nodes (Samsung, SNU)

Education and Training

IIT Madras expanded its strategic collaboration with Applied Materials India Private Limited to advance cutting-edge semiconductor research and workforce development.

The North Texas Semiconductor Institute at UT Dallas launched a new scholarship program for master’s students to address the demand for highly skilled engineers in the semiconductor industry.

Siemens’ “Expedite – Skills for Industry” micro-credential received formal recognition from ABET, the global nonprofit, ISO 9001 certified quality assurance organization.

The MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab completed 54 patent disclosures, an excess of 128,000 citations with an h-index of 162, and more than 50 industry-driven use cases in its eight years of existence doing direct research on AI.

Quantum

Google demonstrated the first-ever verifiable quantum advantage running the out-of-order time correlator (OTOC) algorithm, which it calls Quantum Echoes. The research shows that a quantum computer can run a verifiable algorithm on hardware, overtaking the fastest classical supercomputers by 13,000X.

IonQ demonstrated 99.99% two-qubit gate performance, setting a new quantum computing world record. The company also partnered with Italy’s National Strategy for Quantum Technology to co-found the Q-Alliance quantum hub.

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• • Fabrication and Protection of Integrated Circuits (ICs) – Two Simulation Techniques You Should Know (Oct. 28)
  • Accelerating RTL-to-GDS Digital Implementation With Generative & Agentic AI (Oct. 29)
  • Who said you couldn’t afford a comprehensive SI analysis tool? (Oct. 29)

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Semiconductor Engineering’s latest newsletters:

Automotive, Security and Enabling Technologies
Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials