Chip Industry Week in Review

San Francisco-based Substrate raised more than $100 million to build a vertically integrated foundry that uses particle accelerators to produce “the world’s brightest beams, enabling a new method of advanced X-ray lithography.” The company claims its technology is comparable to ASML‘s high NA EUV, and notes it can extend well beyond 2nm. ASML has not publicly commented.

The Nexperia chip shortage is disrupting vehicle manufacturing in Europe, warns the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association. The problem is not limited to Europe, however. Honda initiated temporary production reductions and stoppages this week at its North American factories in response to the potential chip shortage, and other automakers are taking a ‘war room mentality.‘

Skyworks and Qorvo plan to merge, combining their high-performance RF, analog, and mixed-signal portfolios through a cash-and-stock transaction. The total worth of the combined enterprise is estimated at $22 billion.

NVIDIA struck a number of deals in South Korea, including supplying Samsung, SK Group, Hyundai and others with over 260,000 GPUs for physical and agentic AI.

GlobalFoundries plans to invest €1.1 billion (~$1.3B) to expand its manufacturing capabilities in Dresden, Germany, to produce more than 1 million wafers per year by the end of 2028.

China agreed to a year-long postponement of its expanded rare earth export controls in exchange for the U.S. postponing its 50% affiliates rule, which would have increased the number of Chinese companies subject to U.S. trade restrictions. No agreement was reached on China’s controversial access to NVIDIA’s Blackwell B30A chips.

New technologies:

• Advantest unveiled a modular power semiconductor test platform that supports wafers to power modules, including wide-bandgap semiconductors and power devices with integrated digital IP cores.
• Keysight unveiled a new EDA tool for system-level simulation and optimization of superconducting quantum systems. It includes both a time dynamics simulator for understanding qubit behavior and a dilution fridge input line designer for thermal noise analysis and qubit temperature estimation.

Announcements at NVIDIA GTC this week:

• NVIDIA debuted a data processing unit that combines a Grace CPU and ConnectX-9 networking to support 800Gb/s of throughput for high-performance AI inference.
• The company also introduced NVQLink, a high-speed interconnect to connect quantum processors with classical supercomputers. Numerous quantum processor and system infrastructure companies are supporting the effort, including Keysight. And it unveiled a 6G AI-RAN stack running NVIDIA’s Aerial software, along with a $1B partnership with Nokia.
• Synopsys showcased its solutions and advancements in agentic AI, accelerated computing, and AI physics.

Financial releases: Advantest, Amkor, ASE,  Air Liquide, Cadence, Cohu, Entegris, NXP, Rambus, Samsung, SK hynix, Teradyne, UMC, Western Digital, and Wolfspeed.

Quick links to more news:

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

Global

Americas:

• Meta-lens maker MetaOptics announced a U.S. expansion and a successful prototype of a 127μm diameter co-packaged optical component.
• The Northeast Microelectronics Coalition awarded $10 million to 10 microelectronics projects at regional universities and research centers.
• Seven AI supercomputers are planned at Argonne and Los Alamos National Labs. Also, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, AMD, and HPE are planning two new supercomputers for AI-enabled scientific computing, funded by public-private $1B investments.

Europe:

• Think tank Interface weighed in on the EU AI factory network, noting that “although AI factories are suited to supporting research in training medium-sized AI models, the factories are not sufficient to boost commercial AI innovation across the EU at scale.”
• Infineon collaborated with Silicon Australia Labs to establish a dedicated Ultra-Wideband Application Lab in Graz, Austria.

Asia/Middle East

• Cisco and KAUST jointly launched an AI Institute in Saudi Arabia to focus on edge infrastructure, autonomous mobility and more.
• Toshiba scrapped a silicon carbide wafer agreement with Chinese supplier SICC, according to Nikkei Asia.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Systems and Design newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:

• Special Report: Multiple Challenges Emerge With Physical AI System Design
• Thermal, Mechanical, And Material Stresses Grow With Die Stacking
• Even With AI Inroads, Human Chip Designers Still Essential
• Advances In Formal Verification Technology

More reporting this week:

• Ensuring Reliability Becomes Harder In Multi-Die Assemblies
• Video: Critical Factors For Storing Data In DRAM

Market and Deals

Deals:

• Taiwan’s Delta Electronics will acquire Japan-based Noda RF, a provider of RF power supply systems for IC manufacturing equipment.
• MacDermid Alpha will acquire Micromax, a supplier of advanced electronics inks and pastes.
• GF announced plans to manufacture Silicon Labs‘ wireless SoCs on GF’s new 40nm Ultra Low Power platform in Malta, New York.
• Cadence completed its acquisition of embedded security IP provider Secure-IC.
• onsemi completed the acquisition of rights to Vcore power technologies, including associated IP licenses, from Aura Semi.
• AMD finalized the divestiture of its ZT Systems data center infrastructure manufacturing business to Sanmina.
• NXP closed its acquisitions of Kinara and Aviva Links.

Fundings:

• CyberRidge emerged from stealth with $26 million in funding for its photonic encryption.
• xMEMS Labs raised $21 million for its piezoelectric MEMS fan-on-a-chip for thermal management and solid-state silicon speakers.

Reports and Insights:

• Global shipments of silicon wafers are projected to increase 5.4% in 2025 to 12,824 million square inches, followed by steady growth through 2028, according to SEMI.
• Yole Group found that MEMS revenues from Greater China accounted for 10% of the worldwide MEMS market value.
• AI Insights: Mechanisms of AI Harm (CSET), AI Needs Its Complements (CSIS) and AI infrastructure (IDC).
• Other reports: DRAM (Counterpoint), Quantum (McKinsey), Quartz materials (Techcet), and Graphene (IDTechEx).

Trending Video

Using AI/ML To Find And Correlate IC Test Data: Pinpointing the root cause of low yield in chip manufacturing.

New Technologies

Qualcomm launched AI inference-optimized accelerator cards and racks for data centers.

POLYN Technology successfully implemented its neuromorphic analog signal processing technology in silicon, which processes sensor signals in their native analog form for microwatt-level edge AI.

Infineon launched EasyPACK C, which includes SiC power modules to help address increasing energy demand and sustainability goals in industrial applications. The company also added a SPICE-based model generation to its IPOSIM platform for more accurate system-level simulation.

Socionext introduced a library of configurable chiplets that can be customized at the RTL level for specific applications, including HPC, networking, and automotive.

AI:

• Rebellions adopted proteanTecs’ embedded lifecycle monitoring analytics for its AI inference accelerators.
• Siemens partnered with rhobot.ai to advance its specialized edge-native AI manufacturing solution, now accessible on Siemens Xcelerator.
• MITRE, along with NVIDIA, Cerberus ODC, and Cisco, developed the first U.S.-based AI-native network architecture for 5G and 6G.
• More GTC NVIDIA announcements include: an open reference design for operating gigawatt-scale AI factories, including one tailored for government agencies, a physical AI platform for industrial, robotics, and medical, and Omniverse libraries for building factory-scale digital twins.

Security

Georgia Tech, Purdue University, and Synkhronix researchers developed a side-channel attack called TEE.fail that allows for the extraction of secrets from the trusted execution environment in a computer’s main processor.

Research:

• Secure Once, Adapt at Runtime with eFPGA-Based Redaction for IP Protection (Univ. of Central Florida)
• Understanding and Mitigating Covert Channel and Side Channel Vulnerabilities Introduced by RowHammer Defenses (ETH, CISPA)
• Hardware-Model Logically Combined Attack (Univ. of Tennessee, Univ. of Florida)
• Cybersecurity AI Benchmark: A Meta-Benchmark for Evaluating Cybersecurity AI Agents (Alias Robotics et al.)

CISA issued new alerts/advisories.

Automotive and Batteries

Deals:

• NVIDIA and Uber will jointly build a network of level 4 self-driving robotaxis and delivery vehicles by 2027. The collaboration will use NVIDIA’s DRIVE AGX Hyperion 10 autonomous vehicle platform and software integrated with Uber’s ride-hailing network.
• indie, an automotive solutions innovator, entered into a purchase agreement with United Faith to sell its entire 34.38% outstanding equity interest in Wuxi indie Microelectronics Technology, a Chinese entity.
• The Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research will use Bruker’s nuclear magnetic resonance and electron paramagnetic resonance systems in its battery materials research.

New tech:

• NXP debuted a battery management chipset that integrates Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy for hardware-based synchronization of all battery cell measurements within a single high-voltage battery pack.
• Sony unveiled a CMOS image sensor for automotive applications with a built-in MIPI A-PHY interface.

Automotive Insights and Research:

• An AUTOSAR-Aligned Architectural Study of Vulnerabilities in Automotive SoC SW (Chalmers, U. of Gothenburg)
• A Multi-Domain Review of Challenges and Lessons Learned for Scaling AV Operations Centers. (MITRE)
• From ECU to VSOC: UDS Security Monitoring Strategies (Yekta IT, ETAS, Univ. of Passau).

Research

A team of international researchers produced a form of germanium that is superconducting.

Imec, KU Leuven, and Ghent University researchers re‑engineered strontium titanate for better performance at cryogenic temperatures.

Researchers from UT Dallas and the NeuroSpinCompute Laboratory built a neuromorphic computer by creating a small-scale prototype that learns patterns and makes predictions using fewer training computations than conventional AI systems.

ETH Zurich and UC Berkeley researchers created a debugging tool that reduces the manual effort of verification engineers when analyzing Information Flow Tracking (IFT) violation traces.

People

Amkor CEO Giel Rutten will retire at the end of 2025, but will retain his seat on the company’s board. Kevin Engel, currently COO, will succeed Rutten as president and CEO, effective January 1. Engel will join the board at that time.

Terry Higashi, chairman of Rapidus, was elected and began his three-year term on the SEMI International Board.

Education and Training

Think-tank CSIS warned of the current threats to academic-driven innovation and U.S. security, arguing for an even bigger investment rather than cutbacks.

The State University of New York announced the launch of the SUNY – NY Creates Technology Innovation Institute to support future semiconductor research and workforce development. The two entities will spend $4 million over the next two years on the Institute.

The Birck Nanotechnology Center at Purdue University celebrated its 20^th anniversary. The world’s leading semiconductor companies work with the research center to advance semiconductors.

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• • UALink: Scale-Up Solutions for the AI Factories of Tomorrow (Nov. 4 and 6)
  • Digital Twin Models For Semiconductor Manufacturing Unit Process (Nov. 5)
  • Accelerate Thermal and Flow Optimization with Ansys optiSLang and Thermal Desktop (Nov. 5)
  • Accelerating the Manufacturing Process Using Simulation (Nov. 5)
  • Empowering Autonomous Driving: The Impact Of MIPI CSI-2 On Advanced Sensor Technologies (Nov. 6)

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

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