Chip Industry Week In Review

By Susan Rambo, Gregory Haley, and Liz Allan

Amkor plans to invest about $2 billion in a new advanced packaging and test facility in Peoria, Arizona. When finished, it will employ about 2,000 people and will be the largest outsourced advanced packaging facility in the U.S. The first phase of the construction is expected to be completed and operational within two to three years.

Synopsys plans to add generative AI (GenAI) capabilities across the full stack of its Synopsys.ai EDA suite. The company reports that collaborations with AMD, Intel, and Microsoft already have shown good results. The GenAI will be able to offer expert tool guidance; generative capabilities for RTL, verification, and other collateral creation; and autonomous capabilities for workflow creation from natural language.

The U.S. Patent & Trade Office, which has been criticized for the amount of time it takes to review patents, introduced a new Semiconductor Technology Pilot Program as part of CHIPS for America to fast track semiconductor patents. The program runs from Dec. 1, 2023 to Dec. 1, 2024, or until it accepts 1,000 grantable petitions.

AMD debuted its largest global design center, named AMD Technostar, in Bengaluru, India. The facility spans 500,000 square feet and will employ around 3,000 engineers to design and develop semiconductor technology, including 3D-ICs and AI/ML. The facility is part of AMD’s plans to invest $400 million in India over the next five years.

Quick links to more news:

Design and Power
Manufacturing and Test
Automotive and Batteries
Security
Pervasive Computing and AI
In-Depth Reports
Events

Design and Power

Object Management Group announced a Managed Communities Program in which members can network and participate in the development of community products. The goal is to offer a competitive advantage to participants in the form of learning about best practices and future technologies. The OMG Systems Modeling Community (SMC) will be one of the first communities launched.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) updated its China intellectual property (IP) rights guide to help U.S. rights holders protect their IP rights in China. The latest version is now available for free.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled the next generations of its own chip designs, the Graviton and Trainium chips. The Graviton4 data process unit (DPU) is a CPU for AI inference workloads based on Arm Neoverse and supports 50% more cores and, at the most, 75% more memory bandwidth per CPU than the Graviton3. The Trainium2, an AI training chip, can be able used in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips. Both chips are used to run applications or workloads on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). AWS will also offer access to chip/instance combinations that use the chips from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA.

Samsung Foundry used Cadence’s Tempus Timing Solution and Quantus Extraction Solution to sign off its SF5A SoC design for 5G networking, reporting a 2X productivity boost and faster sign off.

TÜV SÜD recertified that Arteris’ Magillem SoC integration automation software products achieve Automotive ISO 26262:2018 Tool Confidence Level 1 (TCL1).

The University of Tokyo completed its installation of a 127-qubit IBM Quantum Eagle processor into its IBM Quantum System One. Scientists in the Quantum Innovation Initiative (QII) Consortium will have access to the new processor for quantum research in bioinformatics, high energy physics, materials science, finance, and other disciplines.

Manufacturing and Test

The Dutch government decided not to block Chinese-owned Nexperia’s acquisition of Delft-based start-up Nowi, a power management chip company whose technology uses ambient sources of electricity as a power source, reports Reuters. The Dutch government retroactively chose to review the 2022 purchase out of concern for foreign takeovers of potentially sensitive technologies.

Global semiconductor equipment billings fell 11% year-over-year to US$25.6 billion in the third quarter of 2023, while quarter-over-quarter billings slipped 1% during the same period, according to a new report from SEMI. The largest contractions were in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea, while billings in China soared by 42% YoY.

SEMI and the Semiconductor Climate Consortium (SCC) created the Energy Collaborative (EC) to help reduce carbon emissions and install low-carbon energy sources in the Asia-Pacific region.

Teradyne announced plans for TUGx Global Seminars, beginning in February in 18 locations worldwide. The events will include presentations about test strategies for new instruments, software capabilities addressing unique test challenges, and best practices for test applications.

Arbe selected Keysight’s E8719A Radar Target Solution (RTS) to test the Arbe 4D imaging radar chipset for automotive applications.

MediaTek used Keysight‘s 5G Network Emulation Solutions to complete the interoperability development testing (IODT) of MediaTek 5G’s modem. The IODT is based on the 3GPP Release 17 (Rel-17) standard. MediaTek and Keysight tested the 5G New Radio and 5G reduced capability (RedCap) interoperability.

Automotive and Batteries

New electric vehicles (EVs) have an average of 79% more problems than ICE vehicles, according to Consumer Reports’ annual reliability survey. Plug-in hybrid EVs (PHEVs) have 146% more problems, while hybrids experience 26% fewer problems. The report said charging and battery issues are a key concern for EVs, but Tesla is doing better than others.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recalled some 2021-2023 MY Jeep Wrangler PHEVs because they may have a high voltage battery which may fail internally.

Nissan will invest up to £3 billion (US$3.78B) in its EV36Zero hub in Sunderland, U.K., with three EVs and three gigafactories.

Toyota and two affiliates plan to sell about 10% of Denso, a stake likely worth about $4.7 billion, reports Reuters.

The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) and partners finished installing the nation’s first wireless-charging public roadway, equipped with inductive-charging coils that will charge EVs equipped with Electreon receivers as they drive on the road.

Mercedes-Benz and BMW will establish a 50:50 joint venture in China to provide a network of at least 1,000 high-power charging stations with about 7,000 high-power charging piles by the end of 2026.

Lotus launched its EV charging solutions, including an ultra-fast 450 kW DC charger, power cabinet, and a modular unit for charging up to four vehicles at once.

Fig. 1: Lotus Flash Charge. Source: Lotus media download

Geely and NIO partnered on battery swapping in Hangzhou, agreeing to cooperate on battery standards, technology, network expansion and operation, swappable model development, and asset management.

The total battery management system (BMS) market will increase to US$11.9 billion in 2028, with a CAGR of 15.6% between 2022 and 2028, reports Yole.

Researchers at TU Graz and NXP proposed a wireless battery management systems (BMS) solution based on near-field communication (NFC).

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) developed a new method for lithium-ion battery recycling that reduces the amount of hazardous chemicals used in the process.

Chile-based startup T-Phite is looking to make EVs more sustainable by turning used tires into batteries, reports CBS.

Infineon was one of 22 partners in the green energy-focused PROGRESSUS research project, which presented results in Italy. One solution would make it possible to operate 10 to 15 times more EV charging stations on a single network connection.

Security

ETAS, a software-defined vehicles (SDV) specialist, and Infineon certified their cryptographic algorithm suite, validated under the Cryptographic Algorithm Verification Program (CAVP) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This automotive embedded security software stack is implemented on Infineon’s second-generation AURIX TC3xx hardware security module (HSM).

As part of a workshop on attacks and solutions in hardware security, researchers published papers on side-channel analysis and benchmarking, side-channel attacks, deception attack on FMCW radar, lattice-based post-quantum cryptography, exploiting cache timing to recover fingerprint minutiae coordinates, AI and NLP flight circuit leakage, remote fault injection attack against cryptographic modules, and laser fault sensors on FPGA.

Nitrokey released an open-source Hardware Security Module (HSM) called NetHSM. “The professional 19″ device securely stores and manages cryptographic keys and can be used for TLS keys of web servers, for DNSSEC, PKI, CA and blockchains.”

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) released Guidelines for Secure AI System Development to address the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and critical infrastructure. The Guidelines apply to all types of AI systems, not just frontier models.

CISA also published guidance for software manufacturers as part of its new Secure by Design (SbD) alert series; previewed its ReadySetCyber program, which will simplify the process of incorporating cybersecurity into an organization’s business decisions; and issued other alerts.

Pervasive Computing and AI

Infineon and DIGISEQ, a wearable payment specialist, received Mastercard certification for a payment ring with an embedded NFC chip.

Fig. 2: Ring me up. Source: Infineon

Renesas designed and tested a 32-bit CPU core based on the RISC-V ISA and targeted for IoT, consumer electronics, health care, and industrial systems.

Siemens Digital Industries Software launched two simulation tools — HEEDS AI Simulation Predictor software, to address the challenge of AI drift in AI-powered simulation and empower organizations to take advantage of digital twins, and Simcenter Reduced Order Modeling software.

Infineon introduced 15 V trench power MOSFET technology, targeting optimized DC-DC conversion for servers, computing, datacenter, and AI applications. The company also launched a peripheral controller offering fast connectivity with USB 10Gbps and LVDS interfaces.

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) launched the Industry Specification Group for Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISG ISAC) to define a prioritized set of 6G use cases and sensing types, along with a roadmap for their analysis and evaluation.

Dell and Imbue entered a $150 million agreement to build a new high-performance computing cluster for training AI foundation models optimized for reasoning. The Dell PowerEdge server cluster has nearly 10,000 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) previewed Amazon Q, a generative AI powered assistant that is specifically for work tasks such as building applications on AWS, researching best practices, resolving errors, and getting assistance in coding new features for your applications.

Global smartphone shipments in 2023 are projected to decline 5% year-over-year down to 1.2 billion, the lowest in almost a decade, according to Counterpoint. But they are expected to increase by 3% YoY in Q4 2023. In South Africa, smartphone shipments grew 73% YoY and 44% QoQ in Q3 2023. In China, 64% of high-end smartphone users said they are willing to buy a foldable smartphone for their next purchase.

Princeton University and Google engineers developed a technique to teach robots to know when they don’t know, by quantifying the fuzziness of human language and using that measurement to tell robots when to ask for further directions.

MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT-CSAIL) offered three findings on robots. GenSim attempts to supersize the simulation tasks robots can be trained on; aGraphs of Convex Sets (GCS) Trajectory Optimization algorithm offers a scalable, collision-free motion planning system for robotic navigational needs; and a new method leverages crowd-sourced feedback to guide the robot as it learns to reach its goal.

EPFL researchers released Meditron, an open source large language model (LLM) tailored to the medical field and designed to help guide clinical decision-making.

Turkey issued nearly 5 million electronic passports with Infineon’s contactless coil on module solution, which includes a polycarbonate data page with an integrated security chip.

In-Depth Reports

New stories by the Semiconductor Engineering team this week:

• More R&D and real-world testing is needed for safe and secure L4/L5 autonomous vehicles.
• Video: How engineers can utilize AI to push more design elements further left.
• Expert discussion: Problems and potential solutions in heterogeneous integration.

Systems and Design:

• The state of a system is fundamental for performing many analysis and debug tasks, but understanding it and its context is a growing challenge.
• EDA vendors are ramping up the use of AI/ML in their tools to help chipmakers and systems companies differentiate their products.
• 3D-ICs: Advanced packaging has evolved from expensive custom solutions to those ready for more widespread adoption.

Events

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here, including topics such as thermal simulation, Silicon Carbide, CFD simulation and ISO/SAE 21434.

Further Reading and Newsletters

Read the latest special reports and top stories, or check out the latest newsletters:

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