Chip Industry Week in Review

Government funding/defunding

NIST is terminating funding for the SMART USA Institute, a CHIPS Act research center focused on digital twins, prompting congressional concern that the decision disrupts active awards and weakens U.S. semiconductor R&D commitments.

Korea Zinc was awarded $210M in CHIPS Act funding towards a new $6.6B Tennessee advanced smelter and minerals processing facility, providing critical semiconductor materials such as copper, gallium, germanium, and indium. The center is expected to be operational by 2029.

Key reports

SEMI forecasts global semiconductor equipment sales will set a record of $156B in 2027, after projected growth to $133B in 2025 and $145B in 2026.

Pure-play foundry revenues rose 29% YoY in Q3 2025, driven by AI demand and China policy support, according to Counterpoint. TSMC expanded its lead to 72% market share on a strong 3nm ramp. Samsung kept its No. 2 spot, but lost share as leading-edge yields improved slowly. Utilization and wafer shipments are expected to keep rising into 2026.

NIST released a draft of its publication Cybersecurity Framework Profile for AI, providing advice for safely incorporating AI.

Deals

Mythic raised $125M for analog processing units, promising 100X better energy-efficiency than comparable GPUs and AI ASICs.

SCREEN and NY Creates will establish a new R&D center in Albany, New York, focused on production process technology. The $75M initiative also includes shared commitments to strengthen the semiconductor workforce in the U.S. and Japan.

Keysight signed a deal with three Singapore research institutions to advance capabilities in quantum computing, focusing on design, measurement, and control of qubits.

New technologies

Siemens unveiled its PAVE360 automotive technology, a pre-integrated cloud-based digital twin that raises the abstraction level so automotive engineers can understand how various systems interact under different conditions, thereby speeding time to market.

Keysight unveiled secure, AI-powered chat and copilot assistants for its advanced design system (ADS). The AI assistants leverage language models trained on Keysight’s electronic design expertise, delivering accurate responses tailored to RF and high-speed design challenges. Each assistant can be configured individually.

Rapidus announced new AI-agentic design tools optimized for its 2nm manufacturing process. The company reportedly has also developed an interposer cut from a larger than usual size glass substrate to be ready by 2028, reports Nikkei.

Fab updates:

Texas Instruments’ new 300mm semiconductor wafer fab in Sherman, Texas, began production, marking a significant expansion of its U.S. chip manufacturing capacity.

CHIPX announced plans to build the ASEAN region’s first 8-inch GaN and SiC wafer fab in Malaysia, positioning the facility as part of the country’s national semiconductor strategy and a bid to expand regional capacity for power and photonics devices used in AI, EVs, and aerospace.

Financial releases this week: Micron.

Quick links to more news:

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

Global

Europe:

• Institut Montaigne published “Autonomy or Indispensability? Identifying the EU’s Semiconductor Lodestar,” a 70-page policy paper offering concrete policy recommendations to address the EU’s “urgent need for chip diplomacy.”
• German inspection firm QuantumDiamonds is planning a €152M investment to build a new production site in Munich.
• GF formed a partnership with Finnish venture firm Cloudberry by taking a limited partner stake in a new semiconductor and photonics fund aimed at supporting early-stage companies in Europe’s chip ecosystem.

Asia:

• China reportedly built a prototype EUV lithography machine in a state-backed effort likened to a “Manhattan Project,” marking a step toward domestic advanced AI chip production despite the system is not yet producing chips, according to Reuters.
• Japan‘s government announced that a $642M IC prototyping center featuring EUV equipment will start operations in 2029.
• 80% of Rapidus‘ private industry loans will be guaranteed by the Japanese government, reports Nikkei.

Americas:

• Senator Bernie Sanders recommended a moratorium on AI data center construction to allow for public feedback.
• A Michigan House budget panel cut $40M in state funding for the planned Hemlock Semiconductor facility project.
• The SIA provided comments to the Department of Commerce on the American AI Exports program, along with recommendations that the chip industry take the lead in key areas due to its ability to get things done more quickly than government, that the government continue its investments in fabs, which the SIA says could increase U.S. chipmaking capacity 203% by 2032 and boost U.S. share of advanced memory to 12%, compared with just 2% today.

In-Depth

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

• Reliability Risks Shift To The Materials Stack
• What’s Next for 2.5D Packaging?
• Benefits And Limits Of Using ML For Materials Discovery
• Video: Generative AI In Chip Manufacturing

More reporting this week:

• AI Workloads at the Edge: Ensuring Performance, Privacy, and Security
• Environmental Sensors Catch More Data For A Greener World

Reports and Deals

Acquisitions/more deals:

• Advantest and Tokyo Seimitsu will jointly develop a die-level prober aimed at improving test for HPC and AI devices.
• FormFactor acquired Keystone Photonics for its probing technology for Si photonics and CPO wafer testing.
• Onsemi will develop its GaN power devices using GF‘s 200mm eMode GaN-on-silicon process, starting with 650V.  
• India’s Cyient plans to acquire a majority stake in Kinetic Technologies for $93M for its AMS and power management ICs.
• NVIDIA acquired SchedMD, an open-source workload management system.
• Qualcomm completed its acquisition of Alphawave Semi, bringing high-speed wired connectivity to Qualcomm’s Oryon CPUs and Hexagon NPUs.
• Ecolab completed its acquisition of Ovivo’s electronics ultrapure water business.

Funding:

• Neural Concept closed a $100M round for its CAD-native, physics-aware, deep reasoning and AI platform for engineering.
• Mobius Materials closed a $3M seed round for its B2B marketplace for IC parts.

Reports, Think Tanks, Opinions

• AI Use at Work Rises (Gallup poll)
• AI’s 2026 dark horse will be open-standard chips (Reuters)
• The AI Kill Switch: Dangerous Chinese Open Source (CEPA)
• Job apocalypse? Humbug! AI is creating brand new occupations (Economist)
• Strategic Redundancy in Semiconductor Supply Chains: How US-India Cooperation Transforms Global Chip Resilience (SAIS)

Trending Video

Generative AI In Chip Manufacturing: How it works, what it can do, and what can go wrong.

New Technologies

Resonac rolled out a new DL-based image analysis technology for material inspection, claiming ~40% better AI image accuracy.

Applied Optoelectronics revealed a new 400-milliwatt narrow-line-width pump laser for silicon photonics and CPO in data centers.

Vishay rolled out a new series of ultra-fast thin-film chip fuses.

Rigaku launched the ONYX 3200 semiconductor metrology system for in-line metal and bump inspection across BEOL and advanced packaging processes to help stabilize quality and boost yield in complex chip manufacturing.

Nvidia released its Nemotron 3 family of open models with a hybrid latent mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, aimed at agentic AI development across industries. Early adopters include Cadence, Siemens, and Synopsys.

Toshiba implemented Siemens EDA’s tools to speed design, enhance power integrity, and boost reliability for its next-gen analog ICs and power devices.

Lattice upgraded its sensAI stack for edge AI, with expanded pre-trained human-machine interface (HMI) models and simplified RISC-V codebase for customization.

Omnivision released its only single chip full-color sequential LCOS panel for use in next-generation smart glasses.

Quantum

Luminar agreed to sell its photonics business to Quantum Computing Inc. for $110M in cash, subject to U.S. bankruptcy court approval as part of Luminar’s Chapter 11 proceedings.

IonQ expanded its agreement with Switzerland’s QuantumBasel, which is the company’s European hub for industry, academia, and research institutions to explore quantum computing applications and access enterprise-grade systems.

Canada launched Phase 1 of the Canadian Quantum Champions Program (CQCP) with an investment of up to $92M, which is part of the $334.3M investment over five years aimed at anchoring top Canadian quantum companies and talent at home.

UT Austin‘s Texas Quantum Institute received a Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund grant of $4.8M to establish QLab, a quantum-enhanced semiconductor metrology facility.

Los Alamos National Lab researchers led a study that demonstrated low-threshold, continuous-wave lasing using solution-processed colloidal quantum dots. The discovery has application in quantum-dot lasers for on-chip and integrated photonic systems.

Research

Korea University researchers published, “Deep reinforcement learning for scheduling semiconductor cluster tools in varying configurations.”

LLNL and Stanford University engineers and scientists demonstrated a 3D nanofabrication approach that transforms two-photon lithography into a wafer-scale manufacturing tool without sacrificing submicron precision.

More papers:

• Enhancement-mode BEOL In2O3 FETs with Record Logic Performance (MIT)
• DL-based Multi Project InP Wafer Simulation towards Unsupervised Surface Defect Detection (Fraunhofer et al.)
• Quantum Diamond Microscopy for Non-Destructive Failure Analysis of an Integrated Fan-Out Package-on-Package iPhone Chip (QuantumDiamond)
• Find more papers in SemiEngineering’s technical paper roundup for the week.

Security

University of Florida researchers have compiled genAI-driven SoC design and security publications into Deep-Chip, a community website.

Research:

• Breaking ECDSA with EM Side-Channel Attacks: Challenges and Practicality on Modern Smartphones (Fraunhofer, BSI, TUM)
• Efficient Bit-Flip Attacks on Multimodal LLMs using Reinforcement Learning (U. of Missouri-Columbia)

CISA issued new alerts/advisories.

Automotive and Batteries

California’s DMV threatened to ban the sale of Tesla vehicles in the state for 30 days due to the misuse of the term “autopilot” for its driver assist feature.

Western markets are not embracing EVs in the way that governments imagined, reports The Economist. The EU dropped a ban on the sale of petrol cars by 2035. Challenges facing the transition involve the upfront cost and a lack of charging infrastructure.

Ford announced a series of changes related to its Ford+ plan, canceling a planned electric F-Series truck and shifting towards the development of affordable new EV models and hybrids. The company also canceled a $6.5B battery agreement with LG energy.

Infineon’s AURIX family of MCUs and Lenovo’s autonomous driving domain controller units will combine to enable high-performance automotive computing platforms in SDVs.

Imec announced a strategic alignment initiative with Japan’s Advanced SoC Research for Automotive aimed at standardizing chiplet architectures for automotive applications.

Researchers from Argonne National Lab and the University of Chicago discovered some of the root causes of the nanoscopic strains that can lead to cracking in an increasingly popular form of battery for EVs, and prescribed ways to mitigate the damage.

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here.

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Semiconductor Engineering’s latest newsletters:

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