Chip Industry Week In Review

China’s Hefei Lumiverse Technology reportedly has developed a desktop-sized High Harmonic Generation light source that generates wavelengths as small as 1nm. One customer already has used it to produce 14nm chips, which was the original target node for EUV, according to one report. As a point of comparison, TSMC and Samsung didn’t start using EUV until the 7nm node, relying instead on immersion and multi-patterning before that.

New U.S. actions:

• The Trump administration is likely delaying its plan to impose sweeping semiconductor-import tariffs, prompted by concerns over triggering renewed U.S. and China trade tensions, reports Reuters.
• The U.S. authorized the export of up to 35,000 NVIDIA Blackwell chips to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, conditioned on “rigorous security and reporting requirements.”
• The U.S. House of Representatives introduced the SEMI Investment Act. If it passes, it would extend the 35% advanced manufacturing tax credit to U.S. producers of semiconductor materials, including substrates, thin films, and process chemicals.
• The president seeks to block states from regulating AI, despite a recent Gallup poll showing that 80% of U.S. adults believe the government should maintain rules for AI security and safety.

The Dutch government announced the suspension of its Nexperia intervention after “constructive” talks with Beijing. China urged the Dutch government to take “practical actions” to resolve the dispute over Nexperia, saying Dutch intervention and court rulings have created “chaos and turbulence” in the global semiconductor supply chain, reports Reuters.

GlobalFoundries continued its deal-making spree this week.

• It acquired Advanced Micro Foundry, a Singapore-based silicon-photonics foundry, to expand its capacity in optical communications and AI infrastructure;
• Signed a long-term strategic partnership with Navitas Semiconductor to scale U.S.-based GaN technology and manufacturing for AI data centers, high-power computing, and critical power infrastructure, and
• Inked a collaboration deal with BAE Systems to deliver radiation-hardened chips for space missions.

Deloitte released its annual technology predictions report, forecasting that as many as 75% of companies may invest in agentic AI by the end of 2026.  The report included a focus on semiconductor supply chain chokepoints: “The complexity involved in sourcing and packaging multiple dies and components from diverse vendors from different regions will likely make chiplets a major geopolitical chokepoint in 2026.” The firm also predicted EDA will increasingly be bogged down by disclosure requirements related to export controls.

People:

• Cadence announced the appointment of Dr. Luc Van den hove to its board of directors, effective Jan. 1, 2026.
• Synopsys announced that Mike Ellow, formerly CEO of Siemens EDA, is joining the company as chief revenue officer, effective Nov. 20.
• Lisa Su, AMD‘s CEO, was elected the Chair of the SIA Board of Directors.

Financial releases this week: NVIDIA and Soitec.

Quick links to more news:

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

Reports and Deals

Deals

• X-FAB and Fraunhofer ENAS are collaborating on a lab-in-fab approach to advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration.
• Arm integrated Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion universal interconnect into its Neoverse platform to accelerate AI data center adoption.
• d-Matrix and AI Chip will jointly develop a 3D DRAM-based datacenter inference accelerator.
• Global Unichip and Ayar Labs partnered to integrate co-packaged optics into the former’s advanced ASIC design services.
• Onto Innovation completed its acquisition of key materials-analysis product lines from Semilab.
• ASML and CEA-Leti will jointly focus on ‘More-than-Moore’ technologies, including novel substrates such as SiC, GaN photonics materials, and heterogeneous integration.
• Nearfield Instruments and imec are jointly developing metrology solutions for high-NA EUV and 3D heterogeneous integration.
• Nvidia and Microsoft will invest up to $10B and up to $5B, respectively, in Anthropic. In return, Anthropic will scale its AI model Claude on Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure,  and Anthropic will adopt Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin chip architectures.

Funding:

• PicoJool emerged from stealth with $12M in funding for a new class of pixel-level photonics.
• Hummink raised $20M to bring micronic precision printing to advanced manufacturing.
• PowerLattice emerged from stealth with $25M in funding for a power delivery chiplet that tightly couples power and compute.
• AlixLabs closed a €14.1M Series A round to accelerate development and scaling of its atomic layer etching pitch splitting (APS) technology.

Reports:

• Advanced-memory prices are likely to double due to the looming DRAM supply crunch (Counterpoint).
• The MCU market is entering a new growth cycle, projecting revenues to reach $34 billion by 2030 (Yole Group).
• More reports: AI server design, OLED monitors, memory prices (TrendForce)

Think Tanks

• What’s in the New US-Saudi Minerals Agreement (G. Baskaran, CSIS)
• Evaluating China’s Performance: Semiconductors (USCC)
• How China-linked hackers co-opted Anthropic’s Claude (Economist)
• What jobs will be most affected by AI (Brookings)
• Tariffs, Economic Nationalism, and the Future of US Semiconductor Manufacturing (R. Cronin, Stimson)
• Will US efforts to deny China advanced semiconductor chips sustain the U.S.’s lead in AI, or unintentionally accelerate Chinese innovation? (CFR)

In-Depth

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

• Special Report: The Thermal Trap: How Dielectrics Limit Device Performance
• New Panel Production Efforts Target Interposer Costs
• Machine Learning Tools Accelerate Materials Discovery

More reporting this week:

• The Future For Formal Verification
• Edge AI Is Starting To Transform Industrial IoT
• Video: Changes In Mixed-Signal IC Verification
• Video: Advanced Process Control In Semiconductor Manufacturing

Global

Asia:

• Taiwan:
  • Powertech Technology is expanding its panel-level packaging capacity with over $1.3B in capital spending planned next year.
  • GMI Cloud launched a $500M NVIDIA-based AI factory.
• Saudi Arabia:
  • AMD, Cisco and HUMAIN are planning a joint venture to deploy up to 1 GW of AI infrastructure by 2030.
  • Elon Musk announced a 500-megawatt data center for xAI in partnership with HUMAIN.
• India:
  • Altera and AXISCADES will establish a lab in Bangalore aimed at advanced FPGA designs for mission-critical applications.
  • Cyient Semiconductors and Azimuth AI launched a new power platform-on-a-chip, the first of its kind to be designed in India.
  • Marvell plans to increase hiring and research spending in India to keep up with demand for AI infrastructure.
• In S. Korea, SK hynix aims to increase investment in the Yongin semiconductor cluster beyond the initially proposed 128 trillion won ($85.5B) by 2028.

Americas:

• IBM and the University of Dayton are collaborating on R&D for next-gen chip technologies and materials. IBM will contribute equipment to a new semiconductor nanofabrication facility on the university’s campus, to be completed in early 2027, which will provide hands-on, lab-to-fab learning opportunities.
• The U. of Arkansas opened its Multi-User SiC Facility (MUSiC), which it touts as the only openly accessible fabrication facility of its kind in the U.S.
• The U.S. may suffer blackouts this winter due to data center energy needs, reports Bloomberg. In an interview with Yale, a former Energy Department official calls for the use of batteries to power data centers instead of natural resources.
• ERI and ReElement Technologies have signed a commercial processing agreement to recycle end-of-life magnets and produce high-purity rare earth oxides domestically.

Europe:

• CEA-Leti announced a multilateral program on microLED technology for ultra-fast data transfer, with a particular focus on accelerating AI growth.
• The SEMI Europe association published 30 recommendations for the European Chips Act 2.0.
• The European Chips Skills Academy published its 2025 Skills Strategy report, warning that Europe’s semiconductor workforce is on track to face a shortfall of more than 75,000 technical jobs by 2030.

Trending Video

Issues In Ramping Advanced Packaging: Why traditional daisy chain approaches fall short. Jack Lewis, chief technologist at Modus Test, talks about how to obtain data at critical points, how to isolate it from other data, and how much data is required to identify real and latent defects.

Research

Ames National Laboratory received funding to develop new biological approaches to capture critical materials, such as those used in semiconductors, from low-concentration sources like mine tailings and wastewater.

NYU and Brookhaven National Lab researchers showed how substrate choice influences phase formation and interfacial stability in superconducting vanadium silicide films, providing design guidelines for improving material quality.

More research:

• Advancing 2D CMOS electronics with high-performance p-type transistors (MIT)
• Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AI (Stanford)
• Photoinduced twist and untwist of moiré superlattices (Cornell, SLAC, Stanford et al.)
• Photoresist characterization using a tabletop EUV source at 30nm wavelength (UT Austin)

New Technologies

The imec-coordinated NanoIC Pilot Line released the N2 P-PDK v1.0 featuring a library of 29 SRAM macros, including front-side and back-side power-routing configurations for full SoC architectures at sub-2nm logic nodes with realistic memory and power-network integration.

Bruker introduced the VERTEX NEO Ultra, a vacuum FT-IR spectrometer designed to extend infrared and terahertz characterization capabilities for materials and photonics research.

Synopsys unveiled a GPU-native, cloud-based simulation digital twin framework that integrates Ansys’ Fluent, Nvidia Omniverse libraries, and CUDA‑X on Microsoft Azure for real-time digital twin modeling of manufacturing lines. The system cuts CFD simulation time from 3 to 4 hours to less than 5 minutes.

Siemens will make Polarion X, its next-generation ALM SaaS, available on Microsoft’s cloud and AI platform Azure.

Keysight introduced a scalable in-line flash programming system for high-volume electronics manufacturing and its next-gen i7090, a massively parallel and scalable board test system aimed at high-volume PCBA.

Akeana will integrate proteanTecs’ on-device monitoring agents into Akeana’s 5000 Series 64-bit RISC-V processors.

Standards:

• The CXL Consortium released the Compute Express Link 4.0 specification, which doubles bandwidth from 64GTs to 128GTs, adds support for bundled ports, and enhances memory RAS features.
• OIF published OIF-EEI-112G-RTLR (Retimed Transmitter Linear Receiver), which defines a high-speed, energy-efficient 112 Gb/s chip-to-module electrical interface that connects retimed optical transmitters with linear optical receivers, or half retimed optical links.

Data center and AI processing:

• imec launched imec.kelis, an analytical performance modeling tool for AI data centers, providing an end-to-end framework for evaluating system performance across compute, communication, and memory subsystems. The tool is tailored for LLM training and inference workloads.
• Nvidia released the Apollo open model family for accelerating industrial and computational engineering and scientific simulation. Early adopters include Cadence, Lam Research, Siemens, and Synopsys.
• OKI developed simulation technology for high-frequency vias for 1.6 Tbps-class high-speed transmission PCBs aimed at AI data centers.
• Q.ANT released its second-gen photonic Native Processing Unit.

Security

Google introduced Wasefire, a new “secure-by-design” firmware development, enabling developers to create secure firmware without requiring extensive security expertise and only focusing on the business logic they want to implement.

CISA and the NSA released a cybersecurity information sheet with recommendations to mitigate potential cybercriminal activity enabled by bulletproof hosting providers, meaning providers who knowingly lease internet infrastructure to cybercriminals.

Think tank CEPA released the last part of a series on the implementation of the DMA’s interoperability mandate, specifically focused on open access and secure designs.

Broadcom’s Gen 8 128G SAN switch portfolio is now available. The technology combines 128G performance, quantum-safe security, and AI-powered autonomy to enable secure networks for modern data centers.

Upcoming webinar on December 10: The Future of Fault Injection.

Security research:

• Automated Hardware Trojan Insertion in Industrial-Scale Designs ( Univ. of Illinois Chicago)
• Targeted Algorithmic Purpose-Driven Cyber Attacks in Distributed Multi-Agent Optimization (Univ. of Utah)

CISA issued new alerts/advisories.

Automotive

A new study by the Partnership for Analytics Research in Traffic Safety found that vehicles equipped with automatic emergency braking have up to 60% fewer rear-end injury crashes.

Siemens announced that SAICEC, a provider of chip and system design services for the automotive industry, has begun building complex digital twins of automotive architectures based on Siemens’ PAVE360 software.

Fraunhofer IZM experts discuss process optimization for automotive chiplets.

Xiaomi reported a ¥700M (~$98M) profit for its EV and AI division in Q3, about 19 months after launching its SU7 electric sedan. The company has reached profitability faster than Tesla did.

Everspin added to its high-reliability MRAM product line, delivering AEC-Q100 Grade 1 qualification for operation from -40°C to +125°C.

BorgWarner and Deloitte partnered to advance the EV charging industry. The companies invested in research for solutions including cloud-native and software-enabled chargers.

Automotive research:

• Towards a Formal Verification of Secure Vehicle Software Updates (Chalmers Univ. of Tech, Volvo)
• Hardware-in-the-Loop Driving Simulators: Simplifying Real Component Integration in Simulated Environments

Education and Training

Iowa State University researchers are launching a 12-month semiconductor experiential training program in early 2026. It will recruit student scholars from three Iowa community colleges and from science, technology, engineering and math programs at Iowa State.

UT Austin boosted its compute power with high-performance Dell PowerEdge servers and Nvidia AI infrastructure, for a total of more than 5,000 Blackwell GPUs.

Quantum

Infleqtion is collaborating with ORNL to explore how quantum computers can integrate with the world’s most powerful HPC systems.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers demonstrated the world’s largest full quantum chip simulation using about 7,000 Nvidia GPUs on the Perlmutter supercomputer.

The Department of Energy renewed funding in the amount of $125M for the Quantum Science Center through 2030. The lab will collaborate with partners to develop integrated quantum–HPC systems through five coordinated research thrusts.

IBM partnered with Cisco to study how to link quantum processors, laying the groundwork for distributed quantum computing.

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology researchers and others published “Liquid metal printing for superconducting circuits,” opening new paths in the hardware implementation of scaled-up superconducting quantum computers.

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• • Debug Like a Pro: VHDL Testbenches with OSVVM, UVVM, & UVM in Questa One Sim (Dec. 3)
  • Future of Fault Injection – Expanding the Keysight Device Security Toolset (Dec. 10)
  • Trained Eyes on 64G UCIe: Scale Chiplet Integration for AI (Dec. 10)
  • Introduction to Medini Functional Safety for ISO 26262 (Dec. 10)
  • From Silos to Systems, From Data to Insight (Dec. 17)

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

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Systems and Design
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Test, Measurement and Analytics
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