Chip Industry Week In Review

War impacts

• The Iran War’s toll on the chip industry is widening. Over 95% of Taiwan’s energy is imported, causing the country to secure alternative sources. Korea is also heavily dependent on energy imports from the Middle East.
• Shortages of key materials are cropping up everywhere. Helium from Qatar, the second largest producer behind the U.S., is constrained by hostilities in the Persian Gulf. And tungsten, a metal used in semiconductor production, is in short supply due to Chinese export restrictions and competing military demands. The price has more than doubled this year, reports Bloomberg.

AI chip exports

• Nvidia is restarting production of its H200 AI chips in anticipation of being able to send them to Chinese customers.
• The U.S. Dept. of Justice charged three individuals with conspiring to divert billions of dollars of servers with Nvidia GPUs to China, in violation of export rules. One of those charged is a co-founder of Super Micro Computer, according to CNBC.

Memory

• Samsung will supply HBM4 memory for AMD‘s next-gen AI accelerator and DDR5 for CPUs, an expansion of their existing collaboration.
• SK hynix‘s chairman predicts the current memory chip shortage will last another four to five years.
• Micron completed its $1.8B acquisition of PSMC’s P5 site in Tongluo, Taiwan, to expand production of leading-edge DRAM products, including HBM. The company also started high-volume production of HBM4 designed for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin.

At the GPU Technology Conference (GTC), Nvidia and partner highlights include:

• Vera Rubin platform for AI computing, with 7 new chips for AI factories;
• A reference storage architecture; an orbital data center module; a co-designed AI infrastructure reference design; real-time neural graphics rendering, and new open AI models, agent management, and a physical AI platform.
• Nvidia expanded Cadence and Synopsys partnerships and GPU-accelerated industrial software collaborations.

The semiconductor market surpassed $830B in 2025 and could reach $1T in 2026 at the current growth rate, according to Omdia.

Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard are the recipients of the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their contributions to the field of quantum information science and quantum cryptography.

Financial release: Micron.

Europe

• Imec received ASML‘s most advanced high-NA EUV lithography system for sub-2nm logic and high-density memory technologies.
• The EU granted Open EU Foundry status to Silicon Box‘s packaging and test project in Italy, a designation that will speed up approvals and priority access to pilot lines.
• The UK plans to spend up to ~$2.7B on quantum computing, sensing and navigation, and networking over the next four years.
• The Netherlands‘ Future Network Services consortium will receive an additional $246M to advance 6G network chips and technology.

Americas

• The Trump administration rolled out an abbreviated National AI Legislative Framework, preempting most state AI laws.
• Siemens invested $165M to expand its production facilities for low- and medium-voltage electrical equipment for data centers in North and South Carolina, USA.

Asia

• Analog Devices opened a new manufacturing site in Thailand.
• Samsung will spend over US$73B for capital expenditures in 2026, an increase of 22% over the prior year.
• Japan’s Konica Minolta plans to expand its production capacity for its semiconductor optical components.
• China’s 2nd largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Group, is preparing its 7nm process, reports Reuters.

More deals and funding

• UMC, Wavetek, HyperLight, and Jabil are teaming up to deploy thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonics in hyperscale AI data center interconnects.
• Imec will transfer its LPCVD silicon nitride photonic IC platform to New Origin, a Dutch photonics foundry now building its first fab, as part of an ongoing collaboration on PIC technology.
• Tower Semi and Oriole are teaming up on nanosecond optical circuit switching.
• Lightmatter and the Open Compute Project launched an initiative to develop open specifications for a shared reference architecture that enables interoperable co-packaged optics in AI systems.
• Frore Systems raised $143M to scale up its liquid and solid-state air cooling solutions.
• Fraunhofer and others launched a project to develop a thin-film characterization system.

Insights, Opinions

• Meeting China’s Tech Challenge (CEPA)
• The Iran War Is Also Now a Semiconductor Problem (Carnegie)
• Semiconductor Nationalism in China, US, & Europe’s Choices (IM)
• Draft Rules Signal New Semiconductor Export Controls Framework (Pillsbury)
• Taiwan Explained: Why China Claims It, and Why the US Is Involved (CFR)
• Taiwan’s Semis: Backbone Of The Global Tech Economy (Eurasia Review)

Infineon introduced two new high-voltage Intermediate Bus Converter (HV IBC) reference designs, ultra-low noise XENSIV TLE4978 hybrid Hall and coil current sensor, and the XDM700-1 system for monitoring and reporting IC for high-side or low-side current and voltage sensing. The company also expanded its digital power controller portfolio and AI data center voltage regulation portfolio.

Intel uncorked a new series of high-performance mobile processors.

Optics, Data Center

• A new industry group, 400G Optical MSA, was formed to develop specifications for optical interfaces in AI infrastructure equipment.
• Keysight expanded its 1.6T Ethernet interconnect error-performance validation portfolio to include passive copper and low power optics.
• Lumotive designed a programmable 2D photonic beamforming chip.
• Marvell announced a 260-lane PCIe 6.0 switch for AI data centers, alongside a 260-lane CXL switch device that enables rack-level memory pooling.
• AttoTude adopted enhanced signal analysis capabilities in Keysight’s 89600 Vector Signal Analysis SW.
• HyperLight released 400G-per-lane thin-film lithium niobate photonic ICs.
• Credo announced a family of 3nm low‑power, highly integrated 224G/lane optical DSPs designed for AI compute fabrics.
• 800 VDC power solutions for AI data centers were announced by STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments.

A UCLA research team developed a technique to improve electrical current in perovskite semiconductors with a “contact-induced charge-transfer doping method using silver oxide nanoclusters formed at the interface.”

CSIRO researchers created a quantum battery prototype.

New research papers

• Engineering Tiny 3D Metallic Parts (Caltech)
• Predictive design of nanocarbons under extreme conditions (Argonne)
• Dark Matter Detectors Could Improve Quantum Computers (LBNL)
• Simultaneous Bidirectional Signaling for Die-to-Die Links (U. Toronto)
• Record efficiency for perovskite-silicon triple-junction solar cells (EPFL)
• Roadmap for Engineering Combs of Light (Harvard, Peking U.)

• A Waymo passenger in San Francisco was trapped in the vehicle and attacked by a pedestrian, with bystanders cheering on.
• Flexcompute announced a physics-informed AI platform, utilizing CFD data for automotive design.
• Nvidia unveiled an open reference architecture for autonomous vehicle development.
• RF and microwave chip developer GuerrillaRF has expanded into the satellite communication market.
• Honda announced a change of direction and will cancel the production of three EVs set for the North American market.

Battery news

• Vertical Aerospace has initiated a battery pilot production line for its eVTOL aircraft.
• Donut Labs solid-state battery pack was seen charging at 100 kW in a Verge motorcycle.
• General Motors patented a daisy-chain technology to charge multiple electric vehicles at once.
• Eve Energy announced they have successfully rolled out two different solid-state batteries from its production line.

New collaborations.

• Nvidia announced autonomous driving deals with Hyundai, Lyft, BYD and others.
• Quintauris and eSol are teaming up on RISC-V automotive platforms.
• Volkswagen opted to use chips from China’s Xpeng instead of Nvidia‘s.
• Rivian and Uber will jointly deploy 50,000 autonomous robotaxis in San Francisco and Miami before moving to more cities by 2031.

Government actions

• NHTSA announced an expansion of its probe into Tesla’s full self-driving technology in the wake of crashes, with a focus on the system’s abilities to handle reduced roadway visibility conditions.

Vehicle technical papers

• High-Dimensional Discrete Event Sequences (U. Augsburg)
• Label-Free 3D Perception from Infrastructure (Ohio State et al.)
• Spec-based Testing for Autonomous Driving Agents (U. of Virginia et al.)
• Hypervisor-level Memory Bandwidth Reservation for Mixed Criticality Systems (U. of Minho)
• A Vehicle-in-the-Loop and Digital Twin-Based Framework for Central Car Server Testing in Autonomous Driving (TUM, Cariad)
• Quantitative Evaluation of Git-Blockchain Synchronization Models for Trustworthy SW Provenance in Internet of Vehicles (Clemson) 

Think tank IAPS highlighted the fast-growing threat of AI-related attacks, with these two reports:

• AI distillation attacks, defined as “systematic efforts to extract capabilities from frontier AI systems to train competitor models.” The firm recommends adding offenders to the US Bureau of Industry and Security Entity List, assessing sanctions, and utilizing IP laws and NIST to establish minimum standards.
• Highly autonomous cyber-capable agents, including systems that autonomously conduct multi-stage cyber attacks comparable to today’s top illegal hacking or nation-affiliated threat groups. The 159-page investigation dives into the implications and policy recommendations of the emerging threat.

Alerts

• Nine critical flaws in low-cost KVMs (keyboard, video, mouse) were identified across four vendors, giving hackers physical access to every connected machine, reports Eclypsium.
• CISA urges endpoint management system hardening after a cyberattack against U.S. technology firm Stryker and added new additions to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, including some from Google, Wing FTP, and Zimbra.

New offerings

• Keysight established a SW bill of materials to assist companies in complying with new EU CRA regulations.
• Infineon and Nvidia are collaborating on safe and secure humanoid robots, utilizing digital twins of Infineon’s actuators and sensors and other virtual model technology.
• Broadcom shipped its first PQC-safe in-flight network encryption solution.
• TÜV SÜD announces OT risk assessment as a service (OT-RaaS).
• Sandia National Laboratories is now offering a cybersecurity residency, a fast-tracked 6-month hands-on training program that includes memory forensics.

Recent security research

• Read Disturbance Threshold of Real DRAM Chips (ETH Zurich, Rutgers)
• Memory Allocation meets SW Diversity (VU Amsterdam et al.)
• A Training-Free Defense against Bit-Flip Attacks on LLMs (USTC)
• Approach for IC Metal Line Segmentation (Max Planck et al.)
• EM Side-Channels for Reference-Free Detection of Always-On HW Trojans (Howard)
• Gartner estimates that AI applications will cause 50% of all cybersecurity incident response efforts by 2028.

• Unlock productivity with AI-Powered automation and migration in Virtuoso Studio, Mar. 24
• Resolve Material Shortages and Improve Supply Chain Resilience, Mar. 24
• Safety Analysis Innovations, Mar. 24
• Unifying Simulation and Test: Optimize Your RF Design Workflow, Mar. 24

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