Chip Industry Week in Review

Major Deals:

• Taiwan-based UMC is exploring possible collaboration with Polar Semiconductor for high-volume production of 8-inch wafers at Polar’s expanded Minnesota fab, a move that could provide domestic manufacturing capacity for automotive, data center, consumer, aerospace, and defense customers.
• Marvell will acquire Celestial AI for $3.25B, adding photonic fabric technology for optical interconnects that will be used in next-gen AI and cloud data centers.
• And in case you missed it, Nvidia and Synopsys announced a multi-faceted, multi-year deal that includes everything from digital twins to CUDA programming, engineering, and marketing collaboration, in addition to Nvidia’s $2B purchase of Synopsys stock.

In exchange for $150M in equity, the U.S. government will provide Palo Alto-based XLight with up to $150M in federal incentives for the “construction, build out, and demonstration of a free-electron laser (FEL) prototype as an alternative light source for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography” in Albany, New York.

Reports:

• WSTS raised its 2025 semiconductor market forecast to $772B, driven mainly by stronger demand for logic and memory. The organization now projects the global market will reach roughly $975B in 2026, putting the industry on track to hit $1 trillion by 2030.
• SEMI reports global semiconductor equipment billings rose 11 % year-over-year in Q3  to ~$33.7B. The jump is due to strong investments in advanced logic, DRAM and packaging tools.

Micron is ending its Crucial brand consumer memory business, which includes DRAM for laptops, desktops, and servers, as well as SSDs and flash storage, in order to focus on enterprise AI demand.

AWS released its EC2 Trainium3 UltraServers, powered by its first 3nm AI chip, claiming about 4X more compute performance, energy efficiency, and memory bandwidth than its predecessor. The company also announced support for Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion scale-up interconnect for its custom silicon, including Trainium4 chips, as part of an expanded strategic collaboration.

The Open Compute Project and Current/OS announced a new alliance for solving AI data center electric and direct current challenges by blending OCP’s expertise in open hardware with Current/OS’ open standards. The goal is to accelerate the shift from AC-based power to efficient hybrid AC/DC or fully DC-native data center infrastructure.

UT Austin-led researchers unveiled a new advanced packaging 3D-printing method called Holographic Metasurface Nano‑Lithography (HMNL), which can produce complex, multi-material chip packages in a single step, reducing manufacturing time from months to days. The approach could enable novel electronics forms, such as 3D-printed capacitors or non-planar packages, while reducing material waste.

Financial releases this week: Marvell Technology.

Presentations from the 2025 Hot Chips Conference and the International Conference on Neuromorphic Systems (ICONS) are now available.

Quick links to more news:

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

Global

Europe:

• The U.S. Trade Commission ruled in favor of Germany-based Infineon on a patent infringement case concerning GaN technology from China-based Innoscience. If the decision is confirmed, the ruling is expected to lead to a U.S. import ban on related Innoscience products.
• The European Commission and partners signed an MoU to advance the InvestAI initiative with €20B for up to five AI Gigafactories. HPE and Nvidia are jointly building a new AI Factory Lab in Grenoble, France.

Americas:

• A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators introduced a bill to block the loosening of export rules of AI chips from AMD and Nvidia for at least 30 months.
• Canada’s government will invest up to $210M in the semiconductor packaging partnership with IBM Canada and C2MI.
• The SIA released its updated ecosystem map.
• Solstice Advanced Materials broke ground on a $200M expansion of its Spokane Valley facility, a project expected to double sputtering-target production capacity by 2029.

 Asia:

• Germany’s Merck inaugurated its €500M thin films/materials site in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
• Taiwan prosecutors pressed charges against TEL‘s Taiwan subsidiary involving the alleged theft of 2nm IP. (TEL’s response is here.)
• Kioxia collaborated with Google to boost its use of clean electricity via a hydropower retrofit project in Japan‘s Chubu region.

In-Depth

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

• Special Report: Harnessing Silicon Lifecycle Management For Chip Security
• Small Language Models Create New Security Risks
• Physical AI Takes Functional Safety Cues From Automotive
• Optimizing AI Workloads For Edge Computing

More reporting this week:

• 3DKs: Making Headway On Chiplet Standards

Reports and Deals

Deals/Acquisitions

• Tescan Group purchased FemtoInnovations, a University of Connecticut-based startup, in an effort to accelerate research and commercial applications for ultrashort pulsed micro and nanomachining laser technologies.
• onsemi and Innoscience plan to collaborate on accelerating the deployment of GaN power devices, starting with 40 to 200 V devices.
• Snowflake and Anthropic signed a $200M deal aimed at agentic AI for global enterprises.
• Acer and Esquarre plan to invest in Japanese automatic ID and data capture provider Opticon.
• Kioxia, Tsubakimoto, and Eaglys are collaborating on AI-driven image recognition technology to automatically identify products moving through logistics workflows.

Fundings:

• Niobium closed a $23M round to accelerate its FHE platforms.
• Lemurian Labs raised $28M for HW-agnostic AI SW stacks for AI workloads.
• Ricursive Intelligence launched a $35M funding round to speed up semiconductor design.
• Vinci raked in $46M in total funding for its physics-based AI tool for faster HW design and simulation.
• Mixx closed a $33M round to expand its silicon-integrated optical engine.
• Axiado raised $100M+ for its trusted control/compute unit aimed at data center security and management control.
• Alphabet’s CapitalG led an investment in AI cloud-based physical security company Verkada, now valued at $5.8B.

Reports:

• The supply of NAND-flash wafers tightened further in November, driving some contract prices up by more than 60%, reports TrendForce.
• The top five NAND Flash vendors saw combined revenue rise ~16% QoQ in Q3 to $17B, per Trendforce.

Think Tanks, Opinions:

• Geographical distribution of wafer fabrication capacity (OECD)
• Why the GAIN AI Act would undermine US AI preeminence (Brookings)
• What TSMC — and Shakespeare — Can Teach Rapidus (Bloomberg)
• Countering China’s Challenge to American AI Leadership (G. Allen, CSIS)
• Low-cost Chinese AI models forge ahead, even in the US, raising the risks of a US AI bubble (Chatham)

Trending Video

Benefits and Challenges Of Using Chiplets: The challenges of using coherent versus non-coherent interfaces between chiplets, the implications of heterogeneous versus homogeneous chiplets, and the impact on partitioning and derivative designs.

Research

LLNL and other researchers developed a new process for neodymium magnet fabrication that generates high-purity material at high efficiency, but without producing harmful byproducts.

University of Houston engineers developed a specialized 2D thin film dielectric that does not store electricity and can therefore help reduce the energy cost and heat produced by high-performance computing for AI.

Brewer Science and others presented new research on handling 300mm wafers thinned to 15µm at the WaferBond conference in Germany. The research uses Brewer Science’s high-temperature stable temporary-bond adhesive plus IR laser debonding, aiming to overcome stability, thermal-compatibility, and wafer-separation challenges.

More research:

• Ferroelectric transistors for low-power NAND flash memory (Samsung)
• Guided learning lets “untrainable” neural networks realize their potential (MIT)
• Tweaked synthetic polymers boost conductivity (UIUC)
• Aluminum nitride transistor advances next-gen RF electronics (Cornell)
• Success in Measuring Nano Droplets (KAIST)
• A Programmable Semiconductor Containing Active Molecular Photoswitches Located in the Crystal’s Volume Phase (LUH)
• Anomalous electronic state opens a pathway to room-temp superconductivity (Kyoto U.)

Quantum

Deals and Fundings:

• Delft Circuits announced an €8M extension of its previous financing round, for a total of €15M, to build on its high-density I/O solutions for quantum.
• Denmark-based Sparrow Quantum completed its €27.5M Series A round for its chip that can generate single photons one at a time.
• IonQ announced an investment partnership with Canada’s Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine, aimed at next-gen therapeutics.
• Switzerland’s SEALSQ announced an investment in US-based EeroQ, a helium-based quantum architecture company.
• New York-based SEEQC will partner with Taiwan’s ITRI to build a superconducting control chip manufacturing line.

Researchers at the UIUC developed a reconfigurable slow-light platform for on-chip photonic engineering, with a potential application in classical and quantum photonics.

University of Sydney researchers showed how to eliminate a critical source of noise in Brillouin lasers, which produce a very narrow-spectrum light that could be used in quantum computers, advanced navigation systems, ultra-fast communications networks, and precision sensors.

More quantum technical papers:

• Diamond defects, now in pairs, reveal hidden fluctuations in the quantum world (Princeton)
• Milestone on the road to the quantum internet (U. of Stuttgart)
• Breakthrough on quantum signaling (Stanford)
• Exciton Formation in Thin Magnetic Crystals—With Potential for Quantum Computing or Other Advanced Technologies (NREL)
• Pushing the boundary of quantum advantage in hard combinatorial optimization with probabilistic computers (UCSB et al.)

Education and Training

Siemens will help train 200,000 electricians and manufacturing experts by 2030 as part of the expansion of its workforce development partnerships.

Through trade discussions, Taiwan has agreed to help train the U.S. semiconductor workforce. TSMC also has committed an additional investment of $100B to the U.S., bringing its total investment to $160.5B.

A Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund grant of $9.8M has been awarded to Temple College for a new Central Texas Chips Hub in Taylor. The hub will offer programming for veterans and other members of the community.

New report: Agents, robots, and us: Skill partnerships in the age of AI (McKinsey)

New Technologies

Siemens EDA updated its Simcenter X software to offer a unified, multi-domain simulation portfolio, eliminating silos, reducing IT overhead, and boosting productivity through concurrent pre- and post-processing sessions, flexible solvers, and advanced capability access.

Coherent developed a 300mm SiC platform for thermal management issues in AI data centers.

Keysight revealed a new handheld analyzer that enables 120-MHz IQ streaming for gap-free signal capture in RF landscapes.

Wizerr AI introduced an agentic BOM engine that reads and interprets component datasheets, then scales that capability to millions of components, turning unstructured documents into data for multi-agent workflows across the electronics manufacturing value chain.

Rigaku launched a tool that measures the thickness and composition of wafers.

Certus Semiconductor adopted Siemens EDA’s Solido software for custom IC design to accelerate development of I/O and electrostatic discharge (ESD) library solutions for auto, aero, mobile, consumer, industrial, AI, and IoT applications.

Security

CISA and partner reports:

• Principles for the Secure Integration of AI in Operational Technology
• BRICKSTORM Backdoor

Microsoft quietly activated a critical Windows security update against a hacking threat that was first documented eight years ago.

Think tanks on security:

• China’s Weaponization of Global Cyber Supply Chains (CSIS)
• Assessing Irresponsibility in Cyber Operations (Interface)
• How Safe is Your Face? Europe and US states impose tough restrictions on facial recognition, while the US federal government hesitates. China moves full steam ahead (CEPA)

Security technical papers:

• Inner Product Masking with Fault Detection via ISE (KU Leuven, NUS, Rambus)
• Synthesizable Low-overhead Circuit-level Countermeasures (Purdue)
• LLM-based Framework for RTL Trojan Localization (NYU)
• Development of microstructural fingerprint to secure microelectronic packages using X-rays (Purdue)

CISA issued new alerts/advisories.

Automotive

The Trump administration announced a plan to lower fuel economy requirements to 34.5 mpg by 2031, versus Biden-era standards of 50 mpg.

The European Commission is considering a tariff exemption for Volkswagen vehicles made in China.

Infineon will supply SiC power modules to Electreon for its in-road charging technology. The system connects to the power grid, activating vehicles when they’re above embedded copper coils.

TU Munich and partners are developing a centralized architecture for SW-controlled vehicles, which is “largely self-generating and allows the advanced simulation of any scenario involving autonomous vehicles on a test bench.”

Black Sesame Technologies licensed Arteris’ Ncore 3 cache coherent network-on-chip (NoC) IP and FlexNoC 5 non-coherent NoC IP with physical awareness, to deliver full-stack autonomous driving capabilities for next-gen intelligent vehicles.

Automotive research:

• Automating Automotive Software Development (TUM)
• LLM-Empowered Event-Chain Driven Code Generation for ADAS in SDV systems (TUM, Cariad)

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• • Future of Fault Injection – (Dec. 10)
  • 64G UCIe: Scale Chiplet Integration for AI (Dec. 10)
  • Medini Functional Safety for ISO 26262 (Dec. 10)
  • Accelerating SDV time-to-market (Dec. 10)
  • Integrated thermal management systems (Dec. 11)

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

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