Chip Industry Week in Review

Intel hired ex-Qualcomm GPU guru Eric Demers for the company’s high-performance GPU push, setting the stage for a three-way battle with Nvidia and AMD. The key targets for Intel and AMD will be better power efficiency and a programming model that rivals CUDA, but don’t expect Nvidia to stand still.

Acquisitions

• Texas Instruments plans to acquire Silicon Labs for ~$7.5B cash to enhance its embedded wireless connectivity solutions.
• SiTime plans to acquire Renesas’ timing business for ~$2.9B in cash and stock.
• Siemens acquired Canopus AI, a provider of computational and AI-driven metrology software for wafer and mask inspection.
• Infineon plans to buy the non-optical analog/mixed-signal sensor portfolio from ams OSRAM for €570M.

New Collaborations

• Lam Research and CEA-Leti inked a deal to explore novel multi-elemental materials and pathfinding for future fabrication processes of higher-efficiency compound ICs and next-gen specialty technology devices.
• In a new partnership, Dassault Systèmes’ virtual twin platform will be integrated with Nvidia’s AI infrastructure to build a shared industrial architecture for mission critical AI.

Funding

• Cerebras Systems raised $1B for its wafer-scale engine for AI workloads.
• Positron AI raised $230M for its energy-efficient inference platform with a memory-first architecture.
• Eliyan raised $50M to advance the commercialization of its D2D and C2C PHY IP and chiplet interconnect solutions.

Memory

• SoftBank subsidiary SAIMEMORY and Intel will collaborate on R&D of Z-Angle Memory (ZAM), a stacked DRAM architecture for high-capacity and high-bandwidth data processing, with a goal of commercialization by 2030.
• CXMT and YMTC, China’s top memory makers, are aggressively ramping DRAM and NAND capacity in Shanghai and Wuhan.
• TrendForce expects memory prices to increase sharply in Q1 2026, with DRAM contract prices rising 90% to 95% QoQ. Counterpoint Research points to a similar boom.

Earnings reports this week: Arm, AMD, Infineon, MediaTek, Microchip, NXP, Qualcomm, Rambus, Synaptics, Teradyne and X-Fab.

Global annual semiconductor sales grew by 25.6% to $798B in 2025, according to SIA’s latest report.  Fourth quarter sales were 37% more than the same quarter in 2024.

Cadence CEO Anirudh Devgan joined Lam‘s board of directors.

Quick links to more news

Global
Funding, Deals, Reports
New Technologies
Vehicles and Batteries
In-Depth
Research
Universities and Workforce
Security
Trending Video
Quantum
Events and Further Reading

Global

Asia/Middle East

• TSMC will spend $17B to make 3nm chips at its new Kumamoto, Japan fab, instead of prior plans for less advanced nodes.
• Infineon completed the sale of its manufacturing site in Thailand to its supplier MPI.
• Siemens opened an office in Saudi Arabia that will focus on auto, mobility, energy and more.
• IBIDEN is expanding capacity for its high-performance IC package substrates in Gama, Japan.

Americas

• An ex-Google engineer with PRC ties was convicted in a San Francisco federal court of 7 counts of espionage and IP theft, including trade secrets related to Google’s TPUs and GPUs and related software.

Europe

• TU Munich announced a 7nm neuromorphic AI chip design based on RISC-V that can be customized for specific applications.
• The UK is teaming up to combine the country’s compound semiconductor expertise with Bulgaria’s manufacturing capacity.
• The 300mm FD-SOI FAMES Pilot Line was officially inaugurated two years after it began operation.

In-Depth

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

• Securing Hardware For The Quantum Era
• Flexible ICs, MEMS, Metal Oxides Solve Fresh Problems
• Consumer, Med Tech Mushrooms As Quantum Closes In

Plus

• Why Move To 2nm?
• Tech Talk: Changes In Chip Architectures At The Edge
• Opinion: The Verification Conundrum

New ebook

• Chiplet Fundamentals For Engineers: A free 65-page in-depth research report on the next phase of device scaling.

Research

A team at Intel demonstrated three new decoupling capacitor materials that allow much more efficient chip power delivery, using ferroelectric HZO, titanium oxide, and strontium titanium oxide.

Fig.1: Decoupling capacitor (DCAP) technology. Source: Intel

MIT researchers discovered that utilizing excess heat instead of electricity allowed more energy-efficient thermal sensing and signal processing. The technique involved using inverse-designed metastructures that exploit heat conduction as the signal carrier.

More academic papers

• Evaluating LLM Performance in AI-Aided Chip Design (UCSD, Columbia)
• Stream-Based Architectures: From Accelerators to CPUs (Univ. de Lisboa)
• Synthesized graphene nanoribbons for nanoelectronics (ETH Z., Empa et al.)
• Spin-wave band-pass filters for 6G communication (Purdue, BAE)

New Technologies

Arm expanded its Flexible Access program, broadening the range of qualifying startup companies and expanding the available product portfolio to more edge AI NPUs and DSPs.

Infineon released a series of high-performance isolated gate driver ICs with opto-emulator input for SiC applications, including  motor drives, solar inverters, electric-vehicle chargers, and energy-storage systems.

The NanoIC pilot line released two freely accessible PDKs — an A14 pathfinding PDK for the 14-angstrom node with direct backside contact and an eDRAM system exploration PDK for embedded memory integration.

AMD announced new midrange FPGAs with high-bandwidth, real-time performance, and broad connectivity for medical, industrial, test and measurement, and broadcast systems.

Intel launched new workstation processors with up to 86 performance cores and 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0 connectivity.

THine Electronics uncorked a DSP-free chipset for ‘slow and wide’ short-reach PCIe 7 LPO/CPO interconnects.

Axcelis Technologies debuted a high-current ion implanter with optimized beam line design and dose control for semiconductor manufacturing.

Fundings, Deals, Reports

More funding

• Diraq raised ~$13.9M to build silicon-based quantum computers designed to integrate with existing data centers.
• Vexlum raised ~$11.8M to expand manufacturing of semiconductor-based vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VECSEL) for atomic clocks, quantum computers, and semiconductor metrology.

Other M&A

• Excelitas acquired Luxium, a maker of sapphire and garnet substrates for optics and power electronics.
• Smartkem, a maker of semiconductor polymers, plans to acquire Carbonium Core, a producer of nuclear-grade graphite for advanced reactor technologies.
• Solitron Devices, a maker of solid-state power IC parts, is exploring a potential merger or sale.

Reports

• Subsea Optoelectronics Market: Shift to Mesh Networks (Omdia)
• RF GaN: Geopolitics fuel sustained growth (Yole)
• MLCC Market Polarizes in 1Q26  (TrendForce)
• Fab intensity will define silicon parts growth through 2030 (Techcet)

Opinions

• Korea Rivals Taiwan in Chip Prowess (CEPA)
• Due Diligence for Responsible Sand and Silicate Supply Chains (OECD)
• Securing Critical Mineral Supply: Government–Industry Dialogue (CSIS)
• The Complicated Politics of Trump’s New AI Executive Order (CSET)
• Strategic Visions in AI Governance (IAPS)
• Why community benefit agreements are necessary for data centers (Brookings)

Vehicles and Batteries

EVs

• Canada is eliminating the country’s EV mandate for all new auto sales to be electric by 2035, opting instead for stronger greenhouse gas emission standards and incentives to push consumers to greener cars.
• California released new details on pending legislation for instant rebates on EV purchases and requirements for automakers to match state incentives dollar-for-dollar. The program would focus on first-time buyers and include price caps.
• In Europe:
  • Norway: ~95% of first-time registered cars in 2025 (and to date in 2026) were zero-emission vehicles.
  • Germany: BYD sales are climbing, surpassing Tesla in the latest transportation report. And in 2025, PHEVs grew by 62% in Germany and BEVs by 43%, reports DataForce.
• For the first time, all 10 of Consumer Reports’ 2026 best cars of the year are either a hybrid (or available as one) or an EV.

Autonomous driving

• Tesla and Waymo executives testified in Congress to address potential updates to regulations on self-driving vehicles, the lack of consistency across states, as well as a discussion on who’s liable in a crash.
• A U.S. senator is demanding answers from AV automakers about the safety of remote assistance operator (RAO) systems.
• Waymo raised $16B in funding to fuel new operations in an additional 20 cities, including Tokyo and London. The company also commented on a recent incident of one of its vehicles hitting a child in Santa Monica.

China’s new rules

• Effective in 2027, China is banning hidden car door handles due to malfunctions during accidents or battery failures. This comes on the heels of a recent lawsuit filed against Tesla for this issue.
• China published guidance on the secure cross-border transfer of automotive data, setting new rules for automotive data controllers.

Industry happenings

• Indie Semiconductor will integrates its in-cabin sensing SW with Mahindra’s camera-based driver and occupant monitoring HW platform.
• Ford and Zhejiang Geely, a Chinese carmaker, are reportedly in discussions to use Ford’s underutilized European plants to assemble Geely cars.
• Vishay rolled out automotive-grade power inductors in new case sizes.
• Chinese automotive SerDes company Norelsys is reportedly planning an IPO.

Recent vehicle research

• Utah State researchers found solutions for greener EV charging with 31% to 40% lower charging costs.
• Relational Local Dynamic Maps for ADAS (TU Darmstadt)
• Integration of the Test Mode into the ECU for End-of-Line Testing (CTU)

Security

Quantum computers may become a security threat as early as next year, and that threat will continue to grow over the next several years.

Microsoft highlighted new findings on detecting ‘sleeper agent-style’ backdoors in open-weight language models, including a scalable backdoor scanning technique.

Polish cybersecurity research institute CERT Polska published findings on a December 29th coordinated attack on Poland’s energy sector, including analysis of compromised servers, routers, and traffic patterns.

KU Leuven’s researchers won the best paper award at the Microarchitecture Security Conference for “WeMu: Effective and Scalable Emulation of Microarchitectural Weird Machines.”

CISA published a binding operational directive on mitigating risks from end-of-support edge devices and released an infographic on assembling a multi-disciplinary insider threat management team, providing recommendations for addressing emerging vulnerabilities. Also, find the agency’s latest alerts and advisories here.

New academic papers

• Hardware-Triggered Backdoors (BIFOLD, TU Berlin, CISPA)
• Customizing IC3 for HW Security Verification (Princeton)
• Key Recovery from UOV via Single EM Fault Injection (Darmstadt et al)
• Quantum security strength evaluation of cryptographic algorithms (ETRI)
• RRAM Variability Harvesting for CIM-Integrated TRNG (PGI, NTU)
• Detecting HW Trojans in HLS-Generated RTL using LLMs (IIT Kharagpur)
• An Experimental Comparison of Enclave TokenVaults and HSMs for Real-Time Card Tokenization (UT Dallas)

Universities and Workforce

Imec, UGent, and Howest launched a spin-off, Spatial Dynamics, that uses virtual reality and spatial computing to evaluate candidates.

Deloitte, in collaboration with GSA, surveyed over 50 chip industry senior managers and execs on the semiconductor talent transformation, with these findings:

• 93% said efficiency is the biggest driver for integrating AI into the organization (over cost, decision-making, and reducing errors)
• 36% cite faster decision-making as the biggest cultural impact of AI
• 54% said security is their top concern when scaling AI
• 38% said job security concerns are a key negative impact of AI integration, while 36% cite resistance to change

The University of Arizona is teaming with Taiwan’s NYCU to establish a Talent and Innovation Hub.

Florida Atlantic University secured a $4M award to support semiconductor workforce development, defense readiness and other research.

Trending Video

AI In The IC Equipment Ecosystem: David Fried, vice president at Lam Research, discusses how, why, and where LLMs can make a difference in chip manufacturing equipment.

Quantum

New quantum centers

• Los Alamos National Lab established a new Center for Quantum Computing in New Mexico.
• Quantum Machines is planning a flagship hub at the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park.
• Quantum Motion opened an office in San Sebastian, Spain.
• QuEra Computing and Roadrunner Venture Studios plan to build a $4M quantum testbed in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The SUPREME consortium has been granted €50M (~$59M) by the EU and national governments to industrialize superconducting quantum technologies, with a milestone goal of fabricating and demonstrating a 3D-integrated module containing 200 qubits.

Silicon Quantum Computing launched an application-specific quantum simulator comprised of large arrays of silicon quantum dot qubit registers that physically encode replicas of physical systems and chemical interactions.

Taiwan’s Academia Sinica designed and fabricated a 20-qubit superconducting quantum chip and integrated it into a full quantum computing system.

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• Accelerating Static ESD Simulation for Full-Chip, Multi-Die Designs Feb 9
• Compact-Q DEER Spectrometer, Gateway to Quantum Innovation, Feb 10
• Static ESD Simulation for Full-Chip & Multi-Die Designs Feb 10 (Asia)
• From Wall to Rail – Turning Rules of Thumb into Proof Feb 11
• Tamper-Resistant Security: Hardening Systems Against Attack Feb 12

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Semiconductor Engineering’s complete collection of newsletters for all five channels can be found here.