New joint venture for high-speed interconnects; 2nm Indian chips; NAND capacity boost; quantum accelerates; CPO deals; U.S. rare earths deal; new AI chip; earnings bonanza; new test/package plant; free AI training; top memory spot; Stanford’s 10 technologies; AI impact on jobs; annual battery report; secure by design series; job cuts and who’s hiring.
Teradyne and MultiLane are forming a joint venture, MultiLane Test Products (MLTP), to accelerate the development of test solutions for high speed data connections. Teradyne will be the majority owner.
IonQ plans to acquireSkyWater for ~$1.8B, creating a “vertically integrated full-stack quantum platform company.” IonQ also agreed to acquire R&D specialist Seed Innovations and completed its acquisition of Skyloom.
Nvidiainvested $2B in CoreWeave stock as part of its ongoing partnership.
Lightmatter moved toward manufacturing-ready 3D co-packaged optics (CPO) in AI and HPC environments with several collaborations: 1) integration of Synopsys’ 224G SerDes and UCIe IP for 3nm into its Passage 3D CPO platform, 2) incorporation of Cadence’shigh-speed SerDes IP with its Passage optical engine, and 3) partnered with GUC on a joint solution.
Government moves
India’s government outlined the next phase of the Design Linked Incentive Scheme, saying the country will design and manufacture chips for 70% to 75% of domestic applications by 2029. SCL Mohali will support 180nm tape-outs; the upcoming fab at Dholera will support up to 28nm; and Semicon 2.0 will have a roadmap for 3nm and 2nm.
The U.S. signed a non-binding letter of intent with USA Rare Earth to provide up to $277M in direct funding and a $1.3B loan to accelerate the company’s domestic “mine-to-magnet” strategy for rare earths and magnets essential to IC manufacturing.
China will allow ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent to buy 400,000 Nvidia H200 AI chips, reports Reuters.
Fabs
Micron broke ground on a new $24B advanced wafer fab in Singapore, marking a planned investment to expand NAND flash capacity. The fab is expected to begin wafer output in the second half of 2028.
Tesla wants to build its own ‘TeraFab’ to ensure enough chip supply and protect against geopolitical risks.
New Technologies
Imec and Veeco co-developed a 300mm-compatible process for integrating barium titanate onto silicon photonics platforms using a new MBE-based cluster system.
Microsoft launched its Maia 200 inference accelerator, built on TSMC’s 3nm process, with native FP8/FP4 tensor cores, a redesigned memory system with 216GB HBM3e at 7 TB/s and 272MB of on-chip SRAM, claiming 30% better performance per dollar than previous hardware.
SEMI unveiled its 2026 U.S. Policy Priorities under the “Securing the Semiconductor Supply Chain to Enable American AI Leadership” strategy.
Corning and Meta inked a ~$6B deal for U.S. advanced data center buildout, with Corning to supply optical fiber, cable, and connectivity solutions.
Japan and the U.S. are considering building a synthetic diamond production facility in the U.S. as part of Japan’s proposed $550B investment package to strengthen critical material supply chains for chips and precision manufacturing.
SK hynix plans to establish a new U.S. company, now named “AI Company.”
John Neuffer will retire as SIA president/CEO. A search is underway for his successor.
Texas is providing $1M in funding toward LTD Material‘s 88K sq. ft facility for high-purity quartz parts for wafer fabs.
Asia/PAC Rim
Taiwan and the U.S. issued a joint statement on their cooperation on AI, drone systems, and secure AI and semiconductor supply chains.
ASMPT is exploring a divestiture, spinoff, or joint venture of its SMT Solutions business.
Keysight teamed up with Point2 Technology to validate next-gen, multi-terabit interconnects aimed at eliminating scale-up connectivity bottlenecks in AI/ML data centers.
VIS inked a technology licensing deal with TSMC for high-voltage and low-voltage GaN technologies.
Ainekkomerged with Veevx, bringing together the former’s open-source AI-native silicon platform with the latter’s iRAM memory and low-power AI accelerator co-packaged with MCUs for edge silicon.
DexMat raised over $5M seed funding to scale a high-performance, lightweight, carbon-based conductive material called Galvorn as an alternative to copper.
Waseda University researchers achieved ultra-low thermal conductivity in ytterbium-nitride-alloyed AlN thin films, approaching “glassy-limit” insulation while retaining a crystalline structure. The team’s findings point to new pathways for thermal barrier coatings and thermal shielding in semiconductor packaging and high-temperature applications by controlling chemical disorder to suppress heat transport.
Stanford researchers developed a low-power architecture for a practical on-chip optical parametric amplifier (OPA). The device intensifies the light 100 times with only a few hundred milliwatts, making it workable for battery-powered portable electronics.
Fig. 1: Close-up of an optical amplifier chip developed at Stanford. A red laser light shines from an optical fiber on the left to help with aligning the fiber to the chip. (Photo by Jim Gensheimer for Stanford)
Keysight Technologies released a new wireless coexistence test solution aimed at crowded RF environments.
La Luce Cristallina announced its new CMOS-compatible oxide pseudo-substrate, with epitaxial strontium titanate films grown directly on 200mm silicon and SOI wafers.
Kioxia began sampling 4-bit-per-cell, quadruple-level cell (QLC) UFS 4.1 embedded memory devices with its eighth-gen BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory, ideal for mobile and tablets.
Celus and Atlantik Elektronik partnered to streamline the hardware design process, bridging the engineering workflow with reliable component implementation.
Credo launched its Blue Heron 224G AI scale-up retimer for extended cable and PCB backplane links using UALink, ESUN, and Ethernet protocols.
Vehicles and Batteries
New technologies and partnerships
SK keyfoundry released its latest 200V high-voltage 0.18-micron BCD process, expanding into automotive and other power semi applications.
Microchip is offering an expanded touchscreen controller line for automotive displays, offering a broader display size coverage.
Tenstorrent will join the CHASSIS program, a Bosch-led initiative for an open, standardized chiplet platform for SDVs.
Vinfast and Autobrains will jointly develop enhanced L2++ driving tech, along with a new AI architecture they claim eliminates the need for costly lidar, radar arrays, or HD maps.
22% global EV growth in 2025, with BEV demand up 28% and PHEV up 12%.
xEVs account for >50% of new car sales in China
Aggressive pivot toward LFP, which now accounts for ~50% of EV battery sales
40% of cumulative Battery Energy Storage System capacity was installed in 2025 alone
GM took $7.6B in EV-related charges in Q3 and Q4, scaling back its initial EV ambitions due to weaker demand.
In the EU, December sales of BEVs beat gas-only cars for the first time, per the latest ACEA report.
The U.S. EV fast-charging infrastructure grew by 30% in 2025 with over 18K new ports, according to Paren’s state of the industry report.
Tesla is ending production of Model S and X to free up resources for its humanoid robots. The company’s Q425 earnings reflected a 11% YoY decline in automotive revenue and a 3% decline overall.
EU’s Relaxation of Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles Ban Set to Double Range-Extended EV Sales by 2030 (TrendForce)
Security
Intel security researchers explain how a potential way of glitching can result in “Plundervolt-like effects — denial of service, transient computational errors, silent data corruption, and more — without relying on any direct or indirect control over voltage at all.”
MITRE and partners released new research addressing the gap between cloud security frameworks and how hackers actually operate.
Trojan Detection in COTS HW via Statistical Activation of Microarchitectural Events (U. of Kansas, UF)
Upcoming: A 5-part ‘Secure by Design’ webinar series starts February 12, including tamper-resistance security, inline memory encryption & MACsec, quantum safe cryptography, security certification, and UEC security.
Texas’ governor directed all of the state agencies and universities to freeze new H-1B visa petitions and launched an investigation into abuse of the program.
New academic offerings
Yale will eliminate all costs for families with incomes below $100k and will eliminate tuition for families with incomes below $200k.
NASA announced the availability of supercomputer Athena to help scientists and engineers tackle complex challenges in space, aeronautics, and science. Located in the Modular Supercomputing Facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, it delivers over 20 petaflops of peak performance.
Argonne partnered with RIKEN, Fujitsu, and Nvidia to speed up scientific discovery with a focus on future AI/HPC architectures, lab experiment automation, accelerated quantum computing, and more.
InP and SiPho join CMOS as critical technologies. Lasers, CPO and OCS will be everywhere (indium phosphide, silicon photonics, co-packaged optics, optical circuit switch).
Reducing variation in manufacturing, monitoring behavior over time, and targeting specific workloads can have a big impact on power, performance, and area/cost.
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