Chip Industry Week In Review

Advanced nodes and packaging

• AMD announced more than $10B in Taiwan ecosystem investments to scale advanced packaging manufacturing for AI infrastructure. The effort includes EFB-based 2.5D packaging collaborations with ASE and others. AMD also announced the start of its production ramp of its Venice processors on TSMC‘s 2nm process.
• Lam Research established a panel-level packaging center in Salzburg, Austria, expanding R&D for panel-level wet processing for square and rectangular substrates of varying sizes.
• Fraunhofer IPMS demonstrated quasi-monolithic integration, embedding chiplets into structured silicon pockets to enable denser, more compact heterogeneous systems with shorter interconnects.

Deals

• ADI will acquire Empower for $1.5B for its power delivery architecture for AI.
• Cadence acquired EMA Design Automation and FlowCAD, joining the companies into its ESD and Analysis Group and bringing together PCB design technology with a trusted source of electronic component data.
• Mythic acquired Videantis for its unified digital processor architecture and SW stack.
• Blackstone and Google formed a JV to create a TPU cloud.
• Axion acquired Moov Technologies, an equipment marketplace and asset management company, for an undisclosed sum.

Financials:

• Arteris, ADI, Keysight, and Nvidia.

Quantum

• The U.S. Department of Commerce announced a set of planned CHIPS R&D awards totaling over $2B to advance U.S. leadership in quantum computing (QC) and related semiconductor manufacturing technologies. The awards are structured as letters of intent, with the federal government receiving minority, non-controlling equity stakes in recipient companies as part of the funding agreements. Recipients include:

• France also announced investments this week, with an incremental 1B euros for quantum computing and 550M euros for other semiconductor projects.

Innovations

• imec presented a quantum-dot qubit device fabricated with high-NA EUV lithography, calling it the first integrated hardware device created using the technology. The device uses silicon quantum-dot spin qubits with gaps of about 6nm between gates and will utilize 300mm fab-compatible quantum hardware.

Quick links to more news:

 In-Depth | Reports and Deals | New Technologies | Security | Vehicles, Batteries | Quantum  | Trending Video | Research | Events and Webinars

Global

Americas

• Imec’s dedicated deep tech venturing arm, imec.ventures, set up teams in Silicon Valley and on the East Coast to establish a US presence.
• Five companies — Synopsys, Meta, GF, Applied, and Broadcom — launched a $125M, 5-year effort to develop a semiconductor hub at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering to support workforce development for energy-efficient AI chip technologies.
• Amkor secured an additional 67-acre parcel next to its planned 104-acre advanced packaging and test campus in Peoria, Arizona, expanding its long-term U.S. manufacturing footprint.
• U. of Minnesota, Polar Semi, and Honeywell Aerospace are building a Spin Technology Center.
• The Children’s Museum at Saratoga, NY, unveiled Fab Lab, a new hands-on exhibit supported by a $250K gift from GF to introduce children and families to semiconductor manufacturing.

Europe

• Infineon launched Moore4Power, a €91M EU Chips Joint Undertaking project with 62 partners, to develop more efficient, and compact and reliable power electronics using heterogeneous integration of Si, SiC, GaN, sensing, control, and communication technologies.
• The European Commission approved €288M in German State aid to support the construction of two new semiconductor manufacturing facilities in Germany for Carl Zeiss and Zadient Materials.

Asia

• Samsung’s union suspended an 18-day general strike after reaching last-minute, more favorable bonus terms.
• Indonesia and Arm jointly opened a semiconductor training program in Jakarta, aiming to eventually train 15,000 workers in the next 3 to 5 years.

Reports and Deals

More deals and funding

• Light Conversion acquired Hamburg-based Class 5 Photonics for its ultrafast laser technology.
• Credo and Rebellions partnered to create turnkey, scalable AI factories for enterprises by integrating Credo’s ZeroFlap active electrical cables into Rebellions architecture.
• Anthropic is considering using Microsoft’s AI chips, per The Information.
• Hark raised $700M to build foundation models, SW systems, native HW, and new interfaces.
• The Global Electronics Association launched the Global Electronics Policy Council, a formal advocacy body intended to coordinate industry positions on trade, investment, supply chain, workforce, standards, and R&D policy.

Reports

• Worldwide AI Spending to Grow 47% in 2026 (Gartner)
• Global Smartphone Market Share (Counterpoint)
• 1.2x Surge in AI Inference Computing Power in 2026 (TrendForce)
• Gateway to AI for Billions of Users (Counterpoint)

Opinions

• Will the AI Boom Upend the Chip Industry? (CEPA)
• Data Centers In Space? (CFR, video)
• Taiwan is the epicenter of the AI revolution (WT)
• Apple Is Making Hit Products and High Profits From Imperfect Chips (WSJ)

Research

Fermilab is leading AXESS — Accelerating eXtreme Environment Specs-to-Silicon — with Berkeley Lab, Siemens, et al. to use AI to cut custom chip design time for radiation, cryogenic, and ultra-fast environments from months/years to weeks.

Fig. 1: Fermilab engineer Y. Saxena holds a custom circuit board designed to measure chip performance in cryogenic environments. Credit: JJ Starr, Fermilab

Rice University researchers developed large, ordered films of chiral carbon nanotubes (CNTs) that convert light 2 to 3 orders of magnitude better than conventional materials, with potential uses in photonics/optics.

Recent academic papers

• Agentic AI flow for autonomous Accelerator Design (Purdue, Argonne et al.)
• GenAI-Driven Approach to RISC-V Supply Chain Exploration (TUM)
• SRAM-Based Huge Inference Pipelines for Fast LLM Serving (Groq)
• Approach for Defect-Induced Silent Data Corruptions (Stanford, Google)
• High-performance p-type WSe2 transistors
• Wafer-Scale Heterogeneous III-V-on-Silicon Nitride Quantum Photonic Platform (UCSB, MIT et al.)

Security

Intel has a ‘Call for Papers’ deadline of June 15 for its Hardware Security Academic Award, to be announced this fall.  The company also describes how AI automates security gap detection in specifications.

Think tank IAPS supports a “detection-in-depth” approach to fighting AI-powered cyber agents, using a framework with agent IDs, AI-assisted alert triage, agent honeypots, standardized security alerts, and a cross-sector Agentic Cybersecurity Exchange.

Verizon’s recent data breach report warns that software-flaw exploitation is the top breach entry point at 31%.

Vulnerabilities and exploits

• ETH Zurich’s COMSEC team demonstrated “the first Rowhammer privilege escalation exploit on a DDR5 device,” in a video.
• A US senator requested an urgent classified briefing from CISA following a KrebsOnSecurity report that a CISA contractor had exposed AWS GovCloud keys, passwords, tokens, and other internal CISA/DHS credentials in a public GitHub repository.
• Security firm Calif claims it built a working macOS kernel memory-corruption exploit on Apple M5 HW with Anthropic’s Mythos Preview.
• Microsoft says Fox Tempest ran a malware-signing-as-a-service (MSaaS) operation that caused Microsoft Artifact Signing to look legitimate. The company also posted mitigation guidance for the YellowKey security feature bypass vulnerability.
• Other vulnerabilities: Drupal’s SQL injection (highly critical) and CISA’s recent advisories are here, including a number of new industrial control system vulnerabilities.

Academic papers and reports on security

• Side-Channel Leakage w/LLM-Assisted Agents (NTU)
• Scalable Probabilistic RowHammer Defense (UBC, Nvidia)
• Agentic Framewk. for Generating Microarchitectural Attack PoCs (Iowa St.)
• Embedding Distribution Authentication for Counterfeit IC Detection (U. of NC)
• Taking Cryptography Out of the Data Path via Near-Memory Processing in DRAM (UnivTrento, ETH Zurich)

New Technologies

Mixel uncorked its MIPI C-PHY/D-PHY Combo Universal IP on TSMC’s N2P process. The C-PHY IP supports the v2.1 spec, and the D-PHY supports the v3.6 spec.

Infineon expanded its CoolGaN bidirectional switch family with two new devices that lower PCB footprint by up to 82% and cut component count by 50%.

Keysight added end-to-end Electrical-Optical-Electrical simulation to ADS 2026, enabling data center and Ethernet engineers to model high-speed optical links across electrical and photonics domains before hardware implementation.

Quanta Computer selected Siemens Xcelerator software to create a connected digital thread from product design through manufacturing execution. The electronics OEM/ODM manufacturer is targeting a 20% to 25% reduction in new product introduction timelines, with Siemens tools supporting PLM, ALM, process simulation, manufacturing process management, and quality workflows.

Alibaba Cloud unveiled Zhenwu M890, a new T-Head AI accelerator chip for China’s cloud and AI ecosystem, reducing reliance on Nvidia GPUs amid tightening global trade controls on advanced chips.

Nvidia delivered its first Vera CPUs built for agents to Anthropic, OpenAI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and SpaceXAI.

H2 Core Systems, a startup developing modular hydrogen energy systems, is using Siemens’ Xcelerator software and automation portfolio to design and produce compact, high-efficiency systems for generating and storing clean energy on site.

Advantest showcased the integration of AllianceATE’s Velocity software platform with its V93000 SoC test system at VOICE 2026, following Advantest’s acquisition of AllianceATE in September 2025. The design-to-test automation platform streams design files into Advantest testers to accelerate validation and test-pattern deployment for AI and HPC devices.

Vehicles, Batteries

Autonomous and EVs 

• XPENG rolled out its first mass-produced L4 robotaxi in Guangzhou, containing four in-house AI chips, 3,000 TOPS, but no lidar or HD maps.
• Arteris’ system IP technology was deployed by China’s Li Auto, supporting the underlying AI compute data movement and integration automation for Li Auto’s current and future smart vehicles.
• Stellantis is planning a small, affordable, fully electric “E-Car” for Europe and announced a new strategic plan, a number of deals, and new vehicle architectures.

Batteries and charging

• Presto and Bp Pulse will jointly expand fast-charging access for US EV drivers and fleets.
• EDF power solutions signed a deal to procure up to 20 GWh of Ford Energy battery energy storage systems.

Vehicle academic papers and reports

• Sensor Perturbations Expose Reasoning Fragility in Driving VLAs (Nvidia)
• Wi-Fi 6 Gains Auto Industry Momentum (Counterpoint)
• Image-based Point Tracking for LiDAR (Korea U., Purdue, KAIST et al)
• 4D FMCW Lidar Dataset for Motion-Aware Autonomous Driving (Tsinghua)
• Anion-reduction catalytic centres regulate interfacial solvation structures for fast-charging Si anodes (Adelaide, ICL)

Trending Video

DFT In Automotive: What’s needed to ensure reliability of automotive chips, and why it’s about to get even tougher.

Quantum

Infleqtion announced several developments: a new open-source architecture-level resource estimation package; achieved a dual-species rubidium-cesium entangling gate; pre-printed a theory showing a path to neutral-atom entangling-gate fidelity beyond 99.9%; and developed a static magnetic-field approach to sub-Doppler cooling and optical atom transport.

Nord Quantique raised $30M to advance its roadmap toward quantum fault tolerance in 2030.

Quantinuum partnered with Synopsys to integrate quantum into simulation and design tools to solve challenges across aerospace, life sciences, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing.

PsiQuantum announced its new Australian site will be at Moreton Bay Central, Queensland.

Quantum research

• Probing individual quantum emitters in bulk semiconductors via photonic nanojets (U. of Waterloo)
• Integrating QPUs into Data Center Infrastructure (Open Compute Project)

Events and Webinars

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• Practical Performance Tuning with Arm Performix, May 26
• What Your Inference Stack is Trying to Tell You, May 26
• How Data Rates Doubled, and Where Validation Reaches Its Limit, June 4

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including: