Chip Industry Week In Review

Dealmaking

• Amkor inked a 10-year agreement with TSMC to provide advanced packaging and test services in Arizona, tying TSMC’s U.S. fab expansion to domestic OSAT capacity.
• Trump said in a post that Apple will partner with Intel on chip design and production in the U.S., marking a second reported win for the chipmaker this month. Intel Foundry will also reportedly manufacture 3 million TPUs for Google. Intel has not confirmed either deal.
• Brewer Science will acquire Heraeus Epurio‘s ultrapure chemical business.
• Amazon is reportedly in talks to sell its custom Trainium AI accelerator chips directly to outside companies for use in their own data centers. The move comes on the heels of Google’s announcement last month that it will sell its TPUs commercially.
• Cadence and HPE expanded their collaboration to accelerate digital twin-driven data center modernization.

IEEE /JSAP Symposium on VLSI Technology & Circuits

• Intel Foundry said its 18A-P process has entered risk production, with performance, power, thermal, and via-resistance improvements over 18A. The foundry also highlighted longer-term work in CFETs, GaN-on-silicon power integration, and ruthenium interconnects (Fig.1 below).
• Sony and imec unveiled a backside connectivity module for high-density 3D chip integration.
• SK hynix introduced its 4F² vertical-gate DRAM and its electrical characteristics.
• TSMC presented its A16 angstrom-class GAA CMOS platform with Super Power Rail BPD.
• ASML, TSMC, and imec demonstrated a 300mm integration flow for 2D-material nFETs and pFETs with 50nm contacted poly pitch. The work moves 2D transistors closer to manufacturable post-silicon logic.
• Samsung presented its 42nm-pitch 3D stacked FETs/CFET-style logic scaling.

Fig.1: Intel’s ongoing research. Source: Intel Foundry

Memory

• CEA-Leti demonstrated 22nm FeRAM with 3D HZO ferroelectric capacitors for denser, low-power embedded memory in edge AI.
• SK Hynix shipped samples of its 12-layer HBM4E memory to major customers.
• imec reported advances in ferroelectric memory for more efficient AI chips.
• Fraunhofer IPMS and GF researchers integrated hafnium oxide-based ultra-fast ferroelectric FRAM memory into GF’s 22FDX technology node, enabling fast, energy-efficient data storage.
• NOR flash and SLC NAND contract prices more than doubled in the first half of 2026, reported TrendForce.

Global

• The US government signed a letter of intent to provide Coherent with up to $50M to expand InP wafer manufacturing in Texas and finalized a $500M award for SandboxAQ to accelerate AI-driven semiconductor materials discovery.
• Nokia is expanding its advanced test and packaging operations in Pennsylvania to boost U.S. production of photonic chips and optical modules used in AI and telecom infrastructure by 10 times its current level.
• The S. Korean government launched a ~US$520M program to develop on-device AI chips, reports Chosun Biz.
• Rapidus signed an MoU with the UK Semiconductor Centre to explore semiconductor manufacturing cooperation.

Major funding

• HyperLight raised $80M for its TFLN chiplet platform for AI infrastructure.
• AttoTude raised $52M to develop a new scale up interconnect for large AI clusters.

Releases

• Synopsys said its Multiphysics Fusion is now available, fusing Synopsys’ EDA tools with Ansys’ multi-physics analysis.
• ChipAgents introduced Renoir, an LLM for chip design tasks such as RTL generation, bug localization, debugging, and specification-to-code work.
• MLCommons released MLPerf Training v6.0 results, with CoreWeave setting a new record, training DeepSeek-V3 in about two minutes on 8,192 Nvidia GB300 NVL72 GPUs.

People

• Intel appointed Seok-Hee Lee as EVP of Intel Foundry to lead advanced packaging, system integration, and back-end manufacturing. Lee is the former president and CEO of SK hynix, and a former Intel veteran.

Quick links to more news:

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

Reports and Deals

M&A and IPOs

• Keysight completed its acquisition of VPIphotonics, adding system-level simulation to its photonic design automation portfolio.
• Qualcomm is reportedly in talks to buy Tenstorrent, per The Information.
• Tencent-backed AI chip maker Enflame won IPO approval for the Shanghai exchange.
• Renesas acquired Pictorus, gaining a cloud‑based behavioral modeling platform to accelerate embedded system development.

More collaborations

• Murata Manufacturing partnered with Synopsys to give designers easy access to simulation models.
• Seoul National University signed an MoU with Silicon Catalyst to give Korea’s early-stage system-semiconductor and deep-tech startups access to an incubation and investment network in the US and Japan.
• Sony Semiconductor was approved as the MIPI Alliance’s newest promoter member.

More fundings

• Hydra Host raised $100M to expand its GPU-as-a-Service capacity.
• Architect Labs raised $24M for an AI system that can design and provably verify chips end-to-end.

Reports and opinions

• Power SiC enters the AI age (Yole)
• TSMC Accelerates CoPoS Development (TF)
• Top 10 Foundries to 3.7% QoQ Revenue Growth in 1Q26 (TF)
• Space is already a junkyard. AI data centers in orbit would make it worse (Quartz)

Research

KAIST and  Georgia Tech engineers demonstrated a manifold microchannel cooler embedded in silicon that dissipated more than 2,000 W/cm² while keeping junction temperature below 100°C, showing a more energy-efficient path for cooling high-power advanced packages.

UCSD and Google researchers are exploring “phone cluster computing,” in which motherboards of retired smartphones are extracted, collected into clusters, and redeployed as a general-purpose computing platform, creating a data center for researchers and students.

Harvard University researchers “set a new benchmark for enzymatic DNA synthesis by writing 64 distinct sequences in parallel on a semiconductor chip.”

MIT engineers have developed a blueberry-sized sensor device capable of providing real-time measurements of a human body’s core temperature from inside the GI-tract. At 6 mm in diameter and 4 mm in height, the device is much smaller than existing ingestible temperature sensors.

Technical papers

• LLM Agents for VLSI Physical Design (GWU, Brown et al.)
• Automated Clock Gating via  LLM-based RTL Rewriting (Nvidia)
• Persistent Hopping Transport and Frequency Dispersion in Strong-inversion Cryogenic MOSFETs (U. of Tokyo)
• GPU-Accelerated Sparse Matrix Solver for High-Resolution Thermal Simulation of 3D ICs (CUHK, EPFL et al.)

Security

An ETH Zurich team introduced a deterministic fuzzing framework for multi-hart RISC-V CPUs that found five previously unknown concurrency bugs in open-source processor cores.

U. of Birmingham researchers highlighted vulnerabilities affecting baseband processors and SIM cards in smartphones. A lack of robust adversarial testing in baseband development has put user data at risk, and SIM cards can trigger phone actions, exposing risks from hostile SIMs, remote SIM management, and SIM software flaws.

An ISSA study found that 83% of organizations are currently using or planning to use AI for cybersecurity tasks like predictive risk analysis and threat detection, and a quarter of the security organizations increased spending on AI before having “a defined strategy” for the technology in place.

CISA’s alerts for the week are here.

More security research

• 5G Privacy with vSIM (U. of Colorado)
• Fault Injection Attacks in RISC-V (UGA, Politecnico di Torino)
• Foundations of Differential Privacy Against Timing Attacks (Harvard)
• HW Security Competition Benchmarks in the Age of LLMs (TU Darmstadt et al.)
• Microarchitectural Timing Leaks in Pervasive Embedded Processors (Rochester)

Vehicles, Batteries

Automotive IP

• Imagination Technologies contributed its GPU IP to the European CHASSIS collaboration’s new Automotive Base Die project, which is developing a standardized chiplet ecosystem for Europe’s auto industry.
• Rambus rolled out its CryptoManager RT-648, an automotive-grade HW root of trust solution that was built around Arm-based CSS ecosystems. The telechip provides isolation across mixed-criticality workloads and supports scalable security across product families.

Autonomous, drones

• US legislators are demanding an investigation of Tesla’s full self-driving technology for safety risks.
• Stellantis, Wayve and Uber announced a new partnership to jointly develop and deploy driverless robotaxis.
• Mobileye announced plans this week to expand its robotaxi business beyond just supplying self-driving technology by owning and operating its own autonomous ride-hailing business venture.
• Neura Defense Systems announced the launch of a new AI drone detection defense system this week. The system is capable of identifying small drones that emit no radio signal, detecting threats using thermal, acoustic, and visual cues.

EVs and batteries

• Bloomberg projects an 11% year-over-year growth in global EV sales in 2026. While the report still forecasts that EVs will account for more than half of all passenger vehicles by 2035, it decreased its long-term estimate from last year’s outlook amid slowdowns in sales in the U.S. and China.

Policy

• Auto association CLEPA urged European Union leaders to mandate that a vehicle contain at least 75% European-manufactured parts in order for it to be considered a “European vehicle.”

Vehicle research

• Multi-Modal Feature Alignment for Autonomous Driving (BJTU, NTU et al.)
• Radar Performance in Environments with Multiple Interference Sources (GM)
• Remote Activation of Trojan Malware on LiDAR w/Modulated Signals (Duke)

Trending Video

Building Multi-Agent Systems For ASIC Flows: How agents can be used to divide and conquer IC design problems.

If one AI agent can solve a problem in a certain amount of time, can multiple agents solve it faster? The answer is yes, but only if the agents have well-defined roles and targets. This is where orchestrators fit in, and why they are so critical to agentic AI. Kexun Zhang, head of research at ChipAgents, talks about what exactly AI agents are, how they can be used to solve big problems that would require many experienced engineers, and how to parse a problem to maximize the effectiveness of those agents.

Quantum

Government

• SEEQC was awarded participation in a four-year Microelectronics Commons Northeast Regional Defense Technology Hub (NORDTECH) program aimed at advancing scalable fabrication of superconducting qubits using next-gen materials on 300mm industrial-grade Si wafers.
• Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Spain’s government launched the National Supercomputing Laboratory for Dual Technologies, aimed at supercomputing, AI, and quantum technologies.

Deployments

• IQM deployed Pathfinder, a 20-qubit IQM Radiance system, at Oak Ridge National Lab.
• Cornelis Networks deployed a 952-node Lynx cluster, featuring Intel Xeon processors, at LLNL.
• Quantum Computing inked a deal with Planck Dynamics to deploy up to 100 NeuraWave photonic reservoir computers.

Other quantum progress

• AWS and QuEra said they will bring fault-tolerant quantum computers to the cloud.
• D-Wave Quantum announced a gate-model quantum computing simulator.
• China reached mass production of a key isotope in quantum computing, per SCMP.

Workforce, Education

US legislators reintroduced the CHIPS Training in America Act to advance community-college, technical-training, credential, and employer partnership programs for the US chip manufacturing workforce.

Northern Arizona University now offers a three-year engineering technology degree to prepare students for semiconductor, microelectronics, and advanced manufacturing jobs.

Danfoss Power Solutions plans to establish manufacturing operations at NY CREATES’ Computer Chip Commercialization Center in New York, creating up to 300 jobs supporting data-center liquid-cooling components.

Events and Webinars

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• DevOps with Arm Keil MDK, June 23
• Accelerating PDK Readiness Across Every Virtuoso Release, June 23
• Making Automotive Semiconductor Cybersecurity Practical, June 23
• Synopsys Virtual Prototyping Day, June 24
• CoolSiC JFET and its benefits in Solid State Power Distribution, June 24
• Device Security Testing in Semiconductor Industry, June 24
• How Manufacturing Complexity Increased, and Why Validation Had to Evolve, June 25
• Intel: Pushing EMIB Forward: Design Methodology Insights with Synopsys Tools, June 25

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including: