Intel teams up everywhere; GPU rowhammer attack; faster verification; Samsung’s new packaging site; Taiwan IC industry wants stockpiles; China poaches Taiwan talent; thinnest GaN chiplet; AFM-IR; Europe revenue drop; new edge design; BMW hydrogen power; Japanese automotive trouble.
Intel will join Elon Musk’s Terafab chip manufacturing project alongside Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. Intel described its role as helping refactor silicon fab technology for a project targeting production of 1 TW/year of compute for AI and robotics applications.
Intel and Google are expanding a multi-year collaboration on AI and cloud infrastructure, with Intel Xeon processors continuing to power Google Cloud systems. Also, the two companies are expanding the co-development of custom ASIC-based IPUs.
Broadcom will develop and supply Google with future TPUs, networking, and other components.
Anthropic, Google, and Broadcom also inked a deal for multiple gigawatts of next-gen TPU capacity scheduled to come online in 2027, mostly located in the U.S.
Taiwan’s Semiconductor Industry Association is asking the government to stockpile IC related raw materials like helium and liquified natural gas, and to support the reopening of nuclear power plants due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
South Korea’s big ambitions to “construct the highway for the AI era” could also be at risk due to the energy issues stemming from the Iran war, with startups being particularly vulnerable without the months’ worth of supplies some of the bigger chipmakers have.
New tech
Bruker is accelerating development of photothermal AFM-IR spectroscopy for semiconductor research, and has installed its Dimension IconIR system at imec under a joint development project focused on nanoscale materials and interface characterization. The company said the platform can deliver label-free chemical analysis with sub-5nm resolution.
Intel Foundry demonstrated what it describes as the world’s thinnest GaN chiplet, built on a 300mm GaN-on-silicon wafer with a 19μm silicon base, aimed at bringing higher-efficiency power delivery and RF performance into chiplet-based systems.
Fig.1: A cross-sectional electron microscope image showing a GaN power transistor and a silicon logic transistor built side-by-side on the same 300 mm GaN-on-silicon wafer. Source: Intel Foundry
By the numbers
Worldwide semiconductor revenue will blast through the $1 trillion ceiling this year, rising 64% to $1.3 trillion and marking the industry’s strongest growth in more than two decades, according to Gartner. Memory is expected to be the biggest accelerator.
Global IC manufacturing equipment billings rose 15% to a record $135B in 2025, reports SEMI. Test equipment was one of the fastest-growing segments, with billings up 55%.
The SEMI-coordinated European Chips Skills Academy has launched a new online learning platform with free semiconductor training lessons, along with collaboration tools and a jobs and internships marketplace.
Global Electronics Association released its 2026 European EMS report, showing revenue fell ~3% in 2025 and employment declined ~4%, with the sharpest drops in automotive-heavy countries such as Austria, France, and Germany.
Intel and SambaNova partnered on heterogeneous inference for agentic AI, combining GPUs for prefill and SambaNova RDUs for high throughput decode. In addition, SambaNova is standardizing on Intel Xeon 6 processors as the host and action CPUs.
CEA-Leti/List are collaborating with Powerchip to combine RISC-V processor design and microLED silicon photonics with PSMC’s 3D stacking and interposer platforms for next-generation AI systems. The effort is aimed at overcoming limits in copper interconnect bandwidth and power efficiency by adding optical chiplet links and customizable compute architectures to advanced packaging flows.
Everspin Technologies signed an initial 10-year manufacturing agreement with Microchip to expand on-shore MRAM and TMR sensor production, adding a second U.S. source and more wafer capacity as demand grows.
Codasip is divesting its low-end RISC-V processor design business to an unnamed public US semiconductor company and plan to focus on cyber-resilient semiconductor architectures and SoCs.
Fundings
SK hynix invested an undisclosed amount in Barcelona’s Semidynamics to advance memory-centric AI inference chips to break through the memory wall.
Israel’s Q-Factor raised $24M seed funding, with participation from Intel Capital, to build a million-qubit quantum computer.
Bureau Veritas will acquire Lotusworks for €375M, creating a new quality assurance and construction management platform for mission-critical facilities, including semiconductor fabs and data centers.
The Open Compute Project launched a Collaboration Acceleration Fund to provide financial and programmatic support for open hardware innovation.
Reports
Limited Capacity and Order Shifts Drive March Consumer DRAM Price Surge, Led by Sub-4Gb Products (TrendForce)
Siemens and Nvidia announced a significant verification breakthrough, capturing tens of trillions of verification cycles over a few days by utilizing Siemens’ Veloce proFPGA CS scalable and performance-optimized hardware architecture and combining it with NVIDIA’s performance-optimized chip architecture.
Hanmi plans to release its gen-2 hybrid bonder for HBM this year and will start operations in its new factory by mid-2027.
Asahi Kasei Microdevices and Kyoto University announced laser oscillation in a 2 µm-band infrared photonic crystal surface-emitting laser (PCSEL).
Meta debuted a natively multimodal reasoning model, Muse Spark, with support for tool-use, visual chain of thought, and multi-agent orchestration.
Research
Cornell researchers developed an agentic AI architecture that converts electron microscopy images into full materials analysis in minutes.
UC San Diego engineers created a new chip design using a piezoelectric resonator-based DC-DC converter that can improve how GPUs convert and manage power, potentially improving efficiency of data center power management.
U. of Michigan researchers mapped state space models onto a CIM architecture, creating an energy-efficient HW-SW co-design to run AI on the edge.
Geo-spatial prospective life cycle sustainability of InGaN and InGaP compound semiconductors (U. of Sheffield et al)
Characterizing tip-sample interaction dynamics on EUV nanostructures using AFM with a high-aspect ratio tip (Purdue, Intel)
Security
Rising concern over the source and destination of chips, and the components within them, is driving a global effort to tag them in a way that is permanent, immutable, and unclonable. A certificate-based, tamper-proof system can stifle growing grey-market and counterfeit problems. But it requires investment and a lot more coordination.
Toppan, NICT and ISARA have developed a way to upgrade identity/authentication infrastructure to quantum-safe cryptography using a phased approach, without breaking older systems.
Rowhammer, Rowpress
U. of Toronto’s Gururaj Saileshwar described a new rowhammer security attack on GPUs. “By corrupting GPU page tables via GDDR6 bit-flips, an unprivileged process can gain arbitrary GPU memory read/write, and then chain that into full CPU privilege escalation — spawning a root shell — by exploiting memory-safety bugs in the NVIDIA driver. And critically, this works even with the IOMMU enabled (unlike concurrent works).”
Rowhammer has been a persistent DRAM issue across several memory generations, worsening as manufacturing technology has advanced. It’s also been joined by a related issue called Rowpress. New refresh commands can help avoid ill effects, but the only hope for eliminating the issues may rest on a new DRAM cell.
AI security
Anthropic and partners announced Project Glasswing, a new cybersecurity initiative built around its unreleased Claude Mythos Preview AI frontier model, which can discover software security vulnerabilities autonomously.
Meanwhile, UC Berkeley and UCSC researchers demonstrated “peer preservation” behaviors in frontier AI models, where the models can exhibit behaviors such as introducing errors in their responses, disabling shutdown processes, feigning alignment, and even exfiltrating model weights.
New alerts
CISA issued an advisory on Iranian-affiliated attacks on internet-facing operational technology devices, including Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley programmable logic controllers.
MediaTek published a high-level advisory affecting certain chipsets. Samsung also issued an alert involving mobile vulnerabilities.
The UK National Cyber Security Centre issued a warning about Russian attack APT28, enabling DNS hijacking of vulnerable routers and “adversary-in-the-middle attacks that harvest passwords, OAuth tokens and other credentials for web and email related services.”
Disguising Topology and Side-Channel Info through Covert Gate- and ML-Enabled IP Camouflaging (U. of Florida)
Keysight is offering a free embedded systems security bootcamp, covering “how to assess attack paths, use open-source tools to investigate hardware and interfaces, and apply defense strategies based on risk, cost, and attack surface.”
Vehicles, Batteries
New technology
Bosch introduced Rapid Catalyst Heating, a system designed to lower cold-start emissions in gasoline-powered vehicles by up to 70%, providing high thermal power using current vehicle systems without requiring high-voltage architectures.
BrainChip launched a radar reference platform, a hardware and AI stack to provide real-time object classification at the edge.
AVs
California’s proposed legislation will require autonomous vehicle operators to maintain California-licensed, U.S.-based human oversight, including staffing ratios, fast in-person response, and direct coordination with first responders.
For security purposes, Tesla is remotely disabling full self-driving capabilities on impacted vehicles if they detect an unauthorized third party device, reports Teslarati.
EVs
BMW introduced its new flat hydrogen tank system in its iX5 Hydrogen, with around 7 kg storage. It takes less than 5 minutes to fuel for up to 750 km range.
VW is ending production of its ID.4 electric crossover SUV this month due to struggling sales.
A 2026 Lucid Gravity EV caught fire and then reignited days later in New Hampshire, demonstrating how much harder EV battery fires are to fully extinguish compared to traditional car fires.
A class-action lawsuit has been filed against GM for defects in the Cadillac Lyriq electric SUV, causing them to “brick” the vehicle.
Noam Brousard, VP of solutions engineering at proteanTecs, talks about the various causes of silent data corruption, why they’re so problematic, how they can manifest over time, and how to minimize the damage they can cause.
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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