Chip Industry Week In Review

Breaking news: Nvidia and Synopsys announced a multi-faceted, multi-year deal that includes everything from digital twins to CUDA programming, engineering, and marketing collaboration, and Nvidia’s $2B purchase of Synopsys stock.
[Updated 12/1]

Memory news:

• Micron is building a $9.6B HBM facility in the city of Higashi-Hiroshima Japan, reports Nikkei.
• China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) showcased its DDR5 and LPDDR5X at the recent IC China conference. The company claims its DDR5 has die density up to 24 Gb and a peak speed of 8 Gbps, and a top speed of 10.7 Gbps for its LPDDR5X series.
• Global DRAM revenue reached $41B in Q3 2025, an increase of 31% quarter over quarter, according to TrendForce.
• In Korea, SK hynix partnered with convenience store 7-Eleven to release a new semiconductor snack, “Honey Banana Flavor HBM Chips.”

Government investments in the industry are continuing globally:

• The U.S. launched the ‘Genesis Mission,’ an AI supercomputing and quantum initiative involving its 17 national labs, to aid scientific discovery.
• Spain is investing $868M in a new diamond chip foundry in Trujillo.
• The Japanese government intends to provide Rapidus with more than 1 trillion yen (~$6.4B) in subsidies and investment through fiscal year 2027, the target date to begin 2nm production. The company noted that recent media reports about building a 1.4nm node facility are not yet confirmed.
• The UK government will act as a “first customer” for British AI hardware startups, backed by up to £100M of government support, alongside additional planned investment in the broader AI industry and research initiatives.
• The Czech government will provide €450M (~$518M) in grants to Onsemi to support its SiC power device manufacturing facility.

GlobalFoundries acquired InfiniLink, a startup specializing in advanced optical data connectivity chips, including SerDes, optical transceiver chipsets and monolithic silicon photonics. GF also signed a deal with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to team up on education, research, and workforce development.

Meta is reportedly in discussions to use Google’s TPUs (tensor processing units) for Meta’s data centers. If finalized, the deal could slice into NVIDIA’s AI chip dominance.

Cadence released 10 new Verification IPs for emerging interfaces tuned for AI-based designs, including UALink, Ultra Ethernet, LPDDR6, UCIe 3.0, AMBA CHI-H, eUSB2, and UniPro 3.0.

NIST published its workshop report, AI with Open and Scaled Data Sharing in Semiconductor Manufacturing, demonstrating that “manufacturers, even competitors, can agree on a meaningful process for data sharing to achieve significant factory and company operational benefits.”

Financial releases this week: Analog Devices and Semtech.

Quick links to more news:

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

Global

Asia/Middle East/Africa

• TSMC reportedly is adding three more 2nm fabs in Taiwan.
• Imec plans to open a new R&D facility in Qatar in early 2026.
• Applied Materials is planning a new facility in South Korea.
• Fuijfilm opened an advanced semiconductor materials facility in Shizuoka, Japan, to accelerate the development of EUV resists and other technologies.

Americas:

• Lam Research expanded its Tualatin, Oregon, R&D campus with a new $65M office building for up to 700 employees.
• ASML opened a training facility in Phoenix, Arizona.
• Connecticut will invest $121M to boost quantum research and workforce development.
• Wisconsin‘s Economic Development Corp. will provide up to $16M in additional tax credits (now up to a total of $96M) to Foxconn related to its $569M expansion in the state.
• Georgia Tech opened a Center for Wireless Intelligence to accelerate next-gen wireless technologies, including wireless beyond 5G and 6G.

Europe:

• IQM Quantum Computers plans a €40 million (~$46M) expansion of its production facility in Finland.

In-Depth

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

AI Plays Multiple Roles Within EDA
FPGAs Find New Workloads In The High-Speed AI Era
The Real-World Impact Of Silicon Lifecycle Management On Chip Architectures

More reporting this week:

Opinion: Spray and Pray Wastes Power
Two Tech Talks: Challenges in Testing Photonics In Chips and  AI-Driven Collaboration In Chip Manufacturing.

Reports and Deals

Deals and Fundings:

• Samsung and SK Telecom will jointly develop and test core 6G technologies, including AI-RAN (radio access network).
• Sumitomo Chemical plans to buy the Taiwanese semiconductor process chemical company AUECC.
• Presto Engineering acquired Garfield Microelectronics (GFMicro) to further its pure-play ASIC business.
• SoftBank completed its $6.5B acquisition of Ampere Computing.
• NcodiN raised €16M for an industrial pilot of its optical interposer technology with integrated nanolasers.
• QphoX raised €10M for its quantum networking transduction technology.
• SPhotonix raised $4.5M for its long-duration optical data storage, which uses laser nanostructuring of transparent materials.
• Shinephi raised €1M for its phase imaging technology for nano-scale metrology and characterization in semiconductor and materials research.

Reports:

• The global plating chemicals market is expected to reach $1381M in 2025, up 9% from 2024, with copper leading the market for interconnects and advanced packaging (TECHCET).
• More reports: smartphone shipments; PCB shipments surge; critical material recovery.

Think Tanks/Opinions:

• Strengthening Export Controls on Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment (CFR)
• GAIN AI Act in Context: Export Controls and U.S. AI Competitiveness (AAF)
• The Taiwan test: Why Europe should help deter China (ECFR)
• How are Americans using AI? Evidence from a nationwide survey (Brookings)
• US Needs Data Centers, and Data Centers Need Energy, but That Is Not Necessarily a Problem (ITIF)
• Investors expect AI use to soar. That’s not happening (Economist)

Trending Video

Improving IC System Quality And Performance: Alex Burlak at proteanTecs talks about how to identify potential defects in manufacturing, how to determine how close chips are to failure while operating in the field, and how to optimize the interplay between voltage and timing to improve power efficiency.

Research

Princeton researchers developed a diamond-based quantum sensor with a technique that probes real materials directly.

Brewer Science and imec will co-present new thin interposer assembly and flash-lamp debonding research at EPTC in Singapore in early December.

MIT, ORNL and other researchers found that 11.7% of the U.S. labor force can be replaced by current AI technical capabilities, equating to $1.2T in wages. It is important to note the study “measures technical exposure where AI can perform occupational tasks—not displacement outcomes.”

More academic papers:

• DSA of 3D interconnected networks (MIT)
• Toward Open-Source Chiplets for HPC and AI (ETH Zurich, U. Of Bologna)
• GPU-Initiated Networking for NCCL (NVIDIA)
• Design Space Exploration for Tensorized NN HW Accelerators (UCSB)
• RL-based dispatching solutions in semi manufacturing (U. of Klagenfurt, Infineon et al.)

Also find more research in this week’s technical paper roundup.

New Technologies

Beneq released its second-generation ALD platform for wide bandgap power and RF devices, featuring a flow-optimized, 25-wafer mini-batch thermal ALD reactor with high deposition rates and single-digit-second cycle times for common ALD oxides and nitrides.

Tachyum open-sourced its version of DDR5 DIMM, which it calls TDIMM, that can provide 281GB/s bandwidth. It expects power consumption to be 30% higher for 2x bandwidth.

Kneron uncorked an NPU chip capable of running LLMs and full Mamba networks at the edge.

GigaDevice debuted high-performance dual-voltage xSPI NOR flash with a 1.8 V core and 1.2 V I/O design.

Anthropic introduced Claude Opus 4.5, claiming it beats its predecessors in vision, reasoning, and math skills.

Infineon announced that AMD tested its 64 Mb HYPERRAM memory and HYPERRAM controller IP for use with the AMD Spartan UltraScale+ FPGA SCU35 Evaluation Kit, enabling the AMD MicroBlaze V soft-core RISC-V processor with cost-effective HBM.

Security

Think tank IAPS weighed in on the recent Anthropic agentic AI cyberattack, recommending more investments in measurement science and cyber evaluations of AI models under real-world conditions, securing high-value targets with foundational security practices, and incentives to developers to implement differential access strategies.

Japan’s chip plants will now have to adopt cybersecurity protections in order to receive subsidies, reports Nikkei.

SEALSQ and Quobly, a silicon-based quantum microelectronics company, partnered to advance secure and scalable quantum technologies by combining SEALSQ’s expertise in post-quantum security and Quobly’s silicon-based quantum computing platform.

Crypto4A Technologies Inc., a quantum-safe cybersecurity solutions company, launched QxVault, a secrets management platform that integrates a FIPS 140-3 Level 3 compliant HSM for robust management of secrets.

Security Research:

• NEMS for HW Security in Advanced Packaging (U. of Florida)
• A Microarchitectural Solution to Prevent Meltdown and Spectre (U. Of Minnesota)
• LLMs-Powered Real-Time Fault Injection (TU Clausthal)
• Security of deep neural networks: backdoor attacks and IP protection (NUS)
• Challenges in Modelling Analog PUFs (Cochin, IIT)
• Study of Supervised/Unsupervised DRL for Sustainable IoT Edge Gateways (Polytechnique Montreal et al.)

CISA issued new alerts/advisories.

Automotive

Chinese EV maker NIO plans to license its internally developed autonomous driving chip technology to its automotive and robotic customers.

ACEA released a report on new car registrations showing that up through October 2025, battery-electric cars accounted for 16% of the EU market share, an increase from the previous year’s 13%.

In order to offset fuel duty revenue, the U.K. plans to levy a pay-per-mile tax on EVs and plug-in hybrid vehicles starting April 2028. EV owners will have to pay 3 pence per mile, while plug-in hybrid owners will pay 1.5 pence.

The Economist looks at why the self-driving taxi revolution is ‘Waymo complicated than it looks.’

Auto and battery research:

• Introducing a novel system engineering framework for the safe deployment of SDVs (U. of Warwick)
• Determination of the Entropic Heat Coefficient of Lithium-Ion Batteries Based on a Continuous Measurement Method (KIT)

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• • Debug Like a Pro: VHDL Testbenches with OSVVM, UVVM, & UVM (Dec. 3)
  • 1.6T Ethernet Testing: A New Way to Validate Interconnects (Dec. 4)
  • 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)

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Semiconductor Engineering’s latest newsletters:

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