Chip Industry Week in Review

Samsung reportedly is hiking memory chip prices by 30% to 60% due to high demand from AI data centers and constrained supplies. Those shortages are causing ripples elsewhere. SMIC, China’s largest foundry, said its customers are holding back orders for other types of semiconductor due to concerns about memory supplies.

Meanwhile, interest in photonics and power semiconductors is picking up, as evidenced by this week’s investments:

• Venture capital fund Awz Ventures is partnering with the Israeli government to build a national semiconductor foundry in Ashkelon, Israel. The foundry will produce III-V semiconductors primarily for Israel’s defense sector.
• Tower Semiconductor, meanwhile, is allocating an additional $300M for silicon photonics and silicon germanium technologies and an expansion of its Newport Beach FAB 3.
• GlobalFoundries signed an agreement to license TSMC’s 650V and 80V GaN technology to further its own development and production of next-gen power devices at its Vermont facility. Production is expected in late 2026.
• SK keyfoundry will launch a SiC-based power semiconductor foundry business by mid-2026.

M&A:

• Cadence acquired ChipStack, a provider of a generative AI-driven platform for chip verification, including intelligent test planning, test generation, and AI-assisted debugging.
• Arm intends to acquire DreamBig Semiconductor, a provider of remote direct memory access (RDMA) networking solutions, including NICs and a chiplet platform for near memory compute, for approximately $265M in cash. The deal is expected to close by early 2026.

New processors:

• IBM debuted a new quantum processor that has 120 qubits linked together with 218 tunable couplers to enable the execution of circuits with higher complexity. It also introduced an experimental processor with key components needed for fault-tolerant QC. The company is also shifting fabrication of its quantum processors to 300mm wafers in NY Creates’ Albany NanoTech complex.
• Baidu announced two new AI processor chips — the M100 large-scale inference chip will launch early next year, and the M300 chip, tailored for training very large multimodal models with trillions of parameters, will launch in early 2027.

Big Fundings:

• d-Matrix raised $275M for its data center inference platform, which combines digital in-memory compute accelerators with NICs and inference-optimized software.
• Ferroelectric Memory Co. raised €100M (~$116.4M) to commercialize its nonvolatile ferroelectric hafnium oxide memory, which it suggests could replace DRAM and cache SRAM in certain applications.
• Majestic Labs emerged from stealth with over $100M in funding for its AI server architecture, which features custom accelerator and memory interface chips that disaggregate memory from compute.

U.S. Policy:

• CSIS highlighted gaps in the US’ proposed Chips Security Act, which mandates that advanced AI chips must include “chip security mechanisms” prior to export.
• The Council on Foreign Relations‘ 95-page report on U.S. Economic Security recommends a number of targeted government actions in the chip industry and other tech sectors, particularly in the area of critical minerals, workforce development and onshoring of the manufacturing of critical inputs and components for semiconductors, including chemicals, PCBs, and IC substrates

Chinese hackers used Anthropic’s agentic AI tool to perpetrate a large-scale cyber attack without significant human interaction.

Recent financial updates:
Advantest (annual), Applied Materials, Infineon, GlobalFoundries, Kioxia, SMIC, Softbank, TSMC (October revenue), and Tower Semiconductor. Also, AMD provided an outlook at its analyst day.

Quick links to more news:

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

Global

Americas:

• The SIA weighed in on the proposed value-based patent fee structure, saying “imposing a new tax on innovation would impede the competitiveness of the U.S. semiconductor industry and make the U.S. a less attractive place to develop new technology.”
• ITIF explained why U.S. policymakers should keep semiconductor export controls to a minimum.
• Anthropic plans to spend $50B on new data centers in the US.

Asia:

• YMTC is building a third NAND flash fab in Wuhan, China, aiming to be operational by 2027.
• ProteanTecs opened a new office in Yokohama, Japan, and named Noritaka Kojima  as  Japan GM and country manager.
• ASML opened a new training and technical support facility in Hwaseong, S. Korea.

Europe:

• A Dutch government delegation plans to travel to China next week in hopes of resolving the Nexperia issue. Early this week, China granted some export controls exemptions to help relieve the shortage in the automotive industry.
• Baya Systems expanded to Cambridge, U.K., with a new office that will serve as a regional headquarters and strategic collaboration hub.
• Microsoft plans to invest $10B in a Portugal data center park, and Google will invest $6B in Germany for data centers and other operations.
• The UK and the Netherlands signed an Innovation Partnership deal, supporting joint efforts on semiconductors, quantum and AI.
• ESIA issued a position paper on the EU’s Circular Economy Act, recommending the EU “abstain from applying strict material recovery targets and recycling requirements to the semiconductor manufacturing sector.”

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Test, Measurement and Analytics and Low Power–High Performance newsletters this week, featuring:

Two special reports:

• HBM Leads The Way To Defect-Free Bumps
• Noise: A Chip Killer

Four top stories:

• AI In Test Analytics: Promise Vs. Reality
• New Rules Put The Squeeze On Semiconductor Gray Market
• Power Integrity And Voltage Issues Get Harder To Detect And Solve
• Multiple AI Scale-Up Options Emerge

Additional reporting this week:

• Opinion: China GenAI: Who Will Fill The Vacuum?
• Video: Improving IC System Quality And Performance

Reports and Deals

Deals:

• Synaptics’ AI-ready touch and fingerprint sensing will combine with Qualcomm’s compute and biometric security technology to promote secure and intuitive user experiences.
• UMC will mass-produce Metalenz’ polarization-based biometric solution, leveraging UMC’s high-volume 12-inch capacity and wafer-on-wafer bonding.
• yieldWerx will integrate its analytics platform directly into iTest‘s production environment for real-time semiconductor test analytics.
• Poet Technologies and QCi will jointly develop 400G/Lane TFLN modulator-based 3.2Tbps engines.
• AMD finalized its acquisition of MK1, a provider of high-speed inference and reasoning-based AI technologies optimized for large-scale AMD hardware deployments.

Fig.1: Metalenz’s facial authentication solution, manufactured by UMC.

Market Reports

• • Taiwan‘s third quarter IC revenue (including design, manufacturing, packaging and test) totaled US$52B, a nearly 21% increase from the prior year, reports TSIA.
  • Memory industry CapEx (TrendForce)
  • Photolithography materials (Techcet)

More Funding:

• Fabric8Labs raised $50M to ramp production of thermal management, RF, and power electronics components.
• Delvitech raised $40M for AI-powered automated optical inspection.

Trending Video

Virtual Twins: Layers Of Challenges: Lam Research’s David Fried discusses the complexity of connecting different layers to create high-fidelity models, what those layers need to include, and why standards are needed to maximize their benefits and simplify their creation.

Research

Imec is developing technologies to enable z-pitch scaling boosters for 3D NAND flash to allow more layers to be stacked at an economical cost.

Cornell researchers outlined an action roadmap to significantly curb environmental impacts of AI growth, highlighting that new data centers should be located in “windbelt” states and low-water stress states—Texas, Montana, Nebraska, and S. Dakota.

Academic papers:

• Imaging Buried Interfaces in Twisted Oxide Moirés (Cornell, SLAC et al.)
• Long-distance remote epitaxy advances understanding of semiconductor crystal growth (RPI et al.)
• Scalable TMDC memtransistor arrays with Schottky-barrier control for energy-efficient ANNs (NUS et al).
• Extracting the core and cladding contributions to fluorescence and Raman emission in integrated photonic waveguides (MIT et al.)
• Watts and bots: the energy implications of AI adoption (Georgia Tech, U. of Waterloo)

New Technologies

Abhishek Shendre of D2S describes how pixel-level dose correction (PLDC) computing can make curvy mask shapes manufacturable for improved wafer quality in a summary of his paper from SPIE Photomask.

Tachyum announced details and specifications for its 2nm Prodigy Universal Processor, which includes up to 21.3x higher AI rack performance than Nvidia Rubin Ultra NVL576.

Tsavorite Scalable Intelligence emerged from stealth with a composable compute architecture that it claims unifies CPU, GPU, memory, and scale up/scale out connectivity in a single device.

Adoptions/Certifications:

• Blaize adopted Arteris’ FlexNoC 5 interconnect IP in its programmable platform for AI inference across a range of edge and hybrid infrastructure use cases.
• Intrinsic Semiconductor adopted Cadence’s Spectre FX FastSPICE simulator to verify RRAM memory arrays.
• Enphase Energy is using Infineon‘s CoolGaN technology for its next-gen solar microinverters.
• Keysight received the first 5G NR-NTN validations within a 3GPP-based certification program.

Panmnesia announced the sampling availability of its PCIe 6.0/CXL 3.2 fabric switch that supports port-based routing.

Security and Privacy

Google released Private AI Compute in the cloud, an AI processing platform that combines Gemini models from the cloud with security and privacy assurances from on-device processing.

The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill was introduced to the U.K. Parliament. The proposed laws would provide better national security and cyber protection to digital and essential services, including health care, transport, energy and water.

Security Research:

• Row Hammer Effect and Floating Body Effect of Monolithic 3D Stackable 1T1C DRAM (Georgia Tech)
• Decade of Architectural RowHammer Defenses (SNU, Meta et al.)
• Enhancing Adversarial Robustness of IoT Intrusion Detection (York Univ. et al)
• Pre-Silicon Fuzzing of Open-Source Processors (Saarland Univ et al.)

CISA issued new alerts/advisories.

Automotive and Batteries

Deals:

• Rivian and Volkswagen inked a transaction agreement to create a joint venture, Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies, with a total deal size of up to $5.8B. The companies plan to create next-generation electrical architecture and software technology for future EVs.
• Swedish autonomous electric trucking firm Einride, valued at approximately $1.8B, is going public through a SPAC deal with Legato Merger Corp.

Toyota began production at its $13.9B North Carolina battery plant as it ramps up hybrid production.

Waymo expanded its service range to freeways across the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. The company plans to extend services to Austin and Atlanta in the future.

Yole Group conducted an analysis on automotive radar technology, market dynamics, and chipset design, concluding that despite volume normalization, growth remains steady as 166 million radar modules shipped globally in 2024.

Product news:

• Infineon unveiled an advanced MCU designed for high-voltage Li-ion battery management in EVs, which will support zonal architectures and the transition to SDVs.
• Teradar emerged from stealth with the first commercial sensing technology capable of seeing in the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The technology provides up to 20 times the resolution of today’s automotive radar.
• Micron announced shipping of qualification samples of its automotive UFS 4.1 solution to customers globally.

Quantum

Rigetti Computing expects to deliver a 100+ qubit chiplet-based quantum system by the end of 2025, scaling to a 1,000+ qubit system by the end of 2027.

IQM Quantum Computers is planning to release a 150-qubit quantum computer with error correction functionality by the end of 2026.

Post-quantum security BTQ Technologies will acquire QPerfect, which provides a neutral atom quantum emulator and control framework.

Microsoft opened a new quantum lab in Denmark to further develop topological qubits.

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• • Power Supply ICs For Efficient Computing & Networking (Nov. 18)
  • How PCIe Multistream Architecture is enabling AI Connectivity at 64 GT/s and 128 GT/s (Nov. 18)
  • LPDDR6 Unveiled: Protocol Advancements and Smarter Verification with Cadence VIP (Nov. 19)
  • Advancing NTN: Challenges and Opportunities in 6G (Nov. 19)
  • Powering the heart of AI – 48 V to core optimization (Nov. 20)
  • Wireless Coexistence Testing for Medical Devices (Nov. 20)

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

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