Chip Industry Week in Review

SK hynix is ramping HBM manufacturing capacity to meet explosive demand for AI data centers. The company will launch 16-stack HBM4 next year, and up to 12-stack HBM4E. HBM5 and HBM5E will be introduced between 2029 and 2031, reports Business Korea.

China will not have access to NVIDIA’s most advanced chips, President Trump told 60 Minutes.

The Dutch economy minister said Nexperia‘s chips will likely reach customers everywhere in the next few days. The company has been ping-ponging back and forth in recent weeks due to trade restrictions involving shipments from its China-based factory. That, in turn, has caused global disruptions and uncertainty across multiple industries, which rely on Nexperia for discretes and mature-node chips. Nexperia, headquartered in the Netherlands, is a wholly owned subsidiary of China’s Wingtech.

Reports:

• Worldwide silicon wafer shipments increased 3% year-over-year in Q3, according to SEMI.
• European semiconductor sales reached US$14B in Q3, a 7% increase over Q2 and a 6% rise versus Q3 2024, according to the ESIA. Growth was driven largely by a 17% jump in memory chip sales and a 7% increase in analog chip sales.
• Global semiconductor sales reached $208B in Q3, a nearly 16% increase from the previous quarter, according to the SIA. Monthly sales for September rose to US $69.5B, a 25% year-over-year increase.

Fig. 1: SIA’s regional monthly semiconductor sales, compiled by WSTS

New Technologies:

• ASE unveiled IDE 2.0, an upgraded version of its integrated design ecosystem platform, which incorporates AI-based analytics to accelerate semiconductor package co-design, reduce design-analysis cycle times, and improve chip-package interaction for AI and HPC applications.
• ChipAgents developed a multi-agent autonomous root cause analysis system for ASIC debugging that analyzes designs, testbenches, logs, and waveform databases, automatically tracing failures back to their origin and suggesting fixes.
• Google‘s 7th-gen Ironwood TPU will be widely available for public use in weeks. This chip, designed specifically for large-scale AI inference, was initially announced in April 2025. The company also announced a preview of its second Arm-based virtual machine running on Google’s Axion CPUs.
• Volkswagen will develop its own L3 ADAS SoC in China

Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel, was presented with the 2025 Phil Kaufman Award this week for leadership and business impact on the EDA and semiconductor industries.

Fig. 2: Lip-Bu Tan, Intel CEO and 2025 Phil Kaufman award winner, talks with Semiconductor Engineering’s Ed Sperling.  Source: Paul Cohen/ESD Alliance

Financial releases this week: Arm, Arteris, AMD, Lattice, Magnachip,  Navitas,  onsemi, PDF Solutions, Qualcomm, Skywater, Synaptics, Vishay.

Quick links to more news:

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

Global

Americas:

• In exchange for $50M in equity, the U.S. government proposed giving Vulcan Elements $50M worth of incentives for equipment that will support domestic production of rare-earth magnets.
• Elon Musk has announced plans for a Tesla mega AI chip fab and also expects full self-driving approval in China by early next year.
• Entegris opened a new Colorado Springs manufacturing site for its advanced filtration and purification and wafer carrier products.
• Huili Grace Xing of Cornell University and Todd Austin of the University of Michigan will receive SIA’s and SRC’s University Research Awards. Xing is being recognized for her work in III-V nitride materials, oxide devices, and 2D semiconductors, while Austin is honored for his research advancing secure system design, microarchitectures, and more.

Europe and Asia:

• Deutsche Telekom and NVIDIA announced plans to launch Europe’s first large-scale industrial AI cloud platform in Germany.
• Texas Instruments opened a second assembly and test factory in Malaysia.

Australia:

• Quantum Brilliance opened the Quantum Diamond Foundry, the world’s first commercial facility dedicated to producing quantum-grade diamonds at scale.

In-Depth

Special Report: Small Vs. Large Language Models: SLMs targeted at specific workloads could change the relationship between edge devices and the cloud, creating new opportunities for chipmakers, EDA companies, and IP vendors.

Semiconductor Engineering published its Automotive, Security and Enabling Technologies newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:

• LLMs Add Safety Risks To Physical AI
• Moving AI Workloads To The Edge
• How Fast Can Germany Shift To Software-Defined Vehicles?

More reporting this week:

• Formal Verification’s Value Grows
• Opinion: The Next Big Thing
• Video: LPDDR6: Not Just For Mobile Anymore

Market and Deals

Deals:

• Samsung Electro-Mechanics and Sumitomo Chemical Group will establish a joint venture for manufacturing ‘Glass Core,’ aiming to lead in the glass substrate market.
• Siemens and NEC will jointly develop a robot teaching automation solution, combining NEC’s digital twin service with Siemens’ software.
• OpenAI will run its AI workloads on AWS‘s cloud, an estimated $38B commitment.
• Microsoft signed a $9B deal with data center company IREN for compute power.
• Infineon and SolarEdge partnered to advance the development of solid-state transformers for AI data centers.
• Altera licensed Arteris’ interconnect and NoC IP, design integration automation, and hardware-software integration tools to optimize data movement in FPGAs.

Funding:

• RAAAM Memory announced a $17M round for mass producing on-chip memory.
• EuQlid raised $3M for a 3D imaging solution for semiconductors and batteries.
• EdgeCortix reported total funding of more than $110M for its AI inferencing chiplet architecture.

M&A/Spinoffs:

• Qnity Electronics spun off from DuPont as a pure-play provider of IC advanced materials and solutions.
• Amphenol completed its acquisition of Trexon for about $1B in cash.

Reports/Think Tanks:

• TrendForce raised its 2025 CapEx growth forecast for the world’s eight largest cloud service providers to 65% year-over-year, and expects their combined CapEx to exceed $600B in 2026.
• The U.S. electronics manufacturing sector supports over 5M jobs and $1.8T in output, according to the Global Electronics Association.
• AI seems to be everywhere, but regional readiness is uneven (Brookings Institution).
• America, Inc.: The Era of the Portfolio State (FPRI): “Intel and MP Materials are just the bookends of this emerging model. The US government’s equity stake in these companies signals something deeper: America’s techno-industrial playbook, filtered through the grammar of venture capital and, potentially, the architecture of a sovereign wealth fund. This is the Portfolio State.”

Trending Video

In-System Test For AI Data Centers: How test and monitoring data can improve the lifespan of devices.

New Technologies

Keysight and MediaTek collaborated to advance 6G integrated sensing and communication technology through network performance and spectrum efficiency. Keysight also announced a new series of high-power ATE system power supplies.

Siemens announced a new line of industrial control panels designed for protection, automation, and control applications in industrial automation and power distribution.

BrainChip launched its AKD1500 neuromorphic Edge AI accelerator co-processor chip, which achieves 800 giga-operations per second (GOPS) while operating under 300 milliwatts.

GigaDevice unveiled its series of 32-bit general-purpose MCUs, based on the Arm Cortex-M33 core and built on the Arm v8-M architecture, operating at 280 MHz with flexible memory configurations and built-in security.

Okika Devices launched its Chameleon family of tiny analog modules that can adapt to analog design needs.

Security and Privacy

AMD addressed a bug in its Zen 5 processors in its security bulletin. The vulnerability may cause a misclassification of failure as success.

LLMs add safety risks to physical AI, requiring extra measures to avoid accidents and bias with robots and drones.

Six industry experts discussed moving AI workloads to the edge, including the benefits and challenges of processing AI workloads on-device to enhance performance, reduce costs, and ensure data privacy.

Security technical papers:

• Mitigating LLM Memorization in RTL Code Generation Against IP Leakage (U. of Central Florida)
• Laser Fault Injection on RO-based PUFs Implemented on FPGA (U. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS et al.)
• Rowhammer-Induced Stealthy Trojan Attacks on ViT-Based Medical Imaging (U. of Arizona et al.)
• SpyChain: Multi-Vector Supply Chain Attacks on Small Satellite Systems (U. of New Mexico)

CISA issued new alerts/advisories.

Automotive and Batteries

How fast can Germany shift to software-defined vehicles? The design, manufacturing, and business overhaul is beginning, but the threat from low-cost, feature-rich vehicles from China continues to grow.

The European Commission plans to announce a new category of affordable small EVs in December in an effort to counter Chinese competition and revive the European market.

Infineon, along with 28 research partners, developed a new supercomputer for autonomous driving, the Mannheim-CeCaS. The company also announced the expansion of its MOTIX 32-bit motor control SoC family.

Penn State researchers introduced an all-climate battery design that has the potential to unlock stable performance in extreme temperatures.

Siemens inked a deal with HD Hyundai to apply its digital twin, MBSE, and PLM technologies in commercial shipbuilding.

Research

Rice University researchers studying a class of TMDs found that light can trigger a physical shift in their atomic lattice, creating a tunable way to adjust the materials’ behavior and properties.

In robotics, Georgia Tech researchers developed a light-activated soft lens that mimics the human eye’s adaptive focus.

TU Munich students won a gold medal at the iGEM competition in Paris with their biosensor tattoo concept.

More research:

• Enhanced Edge Etching Resistance and EUV Litho.Performance of a Tin-Oxide Photoresist (National Tsing Hua Univ.)
• The van der Waals Gap: a Hidden Showstopper in Semiconductor Device Scaling (TU Wien)
• Heart-on-a-Chip: Model helps identify nanoparticles that can deliver mRNA directly into heart muscle cells (UC Berkeley).

Quantum

Princeton University engineers built a superconducting qubit that lasts for more than 1 millisecond, which is three times longer than the best reported in a lab setting, and nearly 15 times longer than the industry standard for large-scale processors.

Deals:

• Xanadu Quantum and Crane Harbor Acquisition agreed to form a new entity, Xanadu, expected to be the first publicly traded pure-play photonic quantum computing company.
• SkyWater Technology and QuamCore announced a multi-million-dollar collaboration to co-develop superconducting fabrication processes for digital control circuits targeting scalable quantum computing.
• The U.S. Department of Energy announced $625M in funding to renew its five National Quantum Information Science research Centers.

Quantinuum launched Helios, an accurate general-purpose commercial quantum computer to accelerate quantum computing adoption by enterprises. MIT reported that Helios makes error correction simpler.

Education and Training

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute launched the Semiconductor CoLab at NY Creates‘ Albany NanoTech Complex. The 6,000-sq-ft facility is designed to advance semiconductor research and strengthen academic programming in microelectronics.

The University of Florida signed an MoU with Dassault Systèmes to accelerate innovation in the semiconductor industry through the use of virtual twin technologies and advanced virtual modeling platforms.

Boise State University was awarded a $1.5M grant to expand its microelectronics and advanced-materials research infrastructure, notably developing new instrumentation and training to advance materials for extreme environments. The funding will support work in synthesizing and fabricating gallium nitride materials capable of operating under high radiation and thermal stress.

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• • Accelerating NPI with Deep Data: From First Silicon to Volume (Nov. 12)
  • AI/ML Algorithm Design and Testing Toward 6G (Nov. 12)
  • Accelerating Product Development With Computational Materials Engineering (Nov. 13)
  • Bridging Compute and Fabric IP: A New Era for RISC-V System Design (Baya Systems & Tenstorrent) (Nov. 13)

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

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