Amkor and Nvidia signed a $1.5B multiyear agreement to develop advanced packaging and test technologies for next-gen AI and accelerated-computing platforms. Nvidia’s prepayment will support Amkor’s U.S. capacity expansion in Arizona, including high-density interconnect and heterogeneous integration capabilities.
Siemens announced plans to acquire two EDA companies: Defacto Technologies, a provider of tools for automated SoC design creation and integration, and Precision Innovations, which develops AI-driven chip planning and design exploration software built on the open-source OpenROAD framework.
IBM plans to acquire HRL Laboratories, an R&D firm jointly owned by Boeing and GM with expertise in silicon-spin qubits and quantum sensing.
Mitsubishi Electric and Sony Semiconductor will establish a joint venture, Advanced Vision Solutions, to develop image sensors with integrated AI-based analysis of visual data for a range of manufacturing equipment.
Powertech Technology is planning a $400M joint venture with Broadcom to provide panel-level packaging services in Singapore, reports Taipei News.
Anthropic plans to deploy up to 2 GW of AMD’s GPUs in the Helios racks, starting with 1GW in H1 2027. AMD will also invest up to $5B in Anthropic and use Claude for software development.
Cerebras will combine AMD’s rack-scale solution with its wafer-scale engine in a single inference workflow.
AMD partners deploying the new infrastructure include OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and others.
Nokia is planning to acquire NXP‘s Chandler, Arizona fab to expand its indium phosphide semiconductor manufacturing capacity. Subject to approvals, Nokia plans to lease part of the site, starting early next year, and convert it to indium phosphide production for optical components, with the full acquisition expected to close in Q1 2029.
Paras Semiconductors signed an MoU for a ~US$644M OSAT facility in Madhya Pradesh, India.
Big funding
Etched added $300M to scale production of its frontier model inference rack-scale system made up of co-designed chips, packages, PCBs, cold plates, and interconnects.
Photonics is forcing EDA to verify not just chips, but the physics of light inside full electro-optical systems.
A UIUC team developed an integrated-THz tunable TFLN optical isolator based on electro-optic non-reciprocal strong coupling.
Ghent U. and imec demonstrated real-time optical-signal equalization using a silicon-photonic computing chip, potentially reducing the power and latency required to correct distortions in high-speed fiber networks.
CISA issued a new advisory on Iranian-affiliated targeting efforts of OT devices, including programmable logic controllers, across critical infrastructure in the U.S.
Analysis
TrendForce expects NAND flash supply constraints to ease in H2 2027, driven by weakened demand for smartphones and notebook PCs.
The advanced packaging market reached $55B in 2025 and could exceed $120B by 2031, according to Yole Group.
US Is About to Design an AI Regulator: Here’s How to Get It Right (CFR)
New Technologies
Design
Keysight unveiled a multiphysics design and verification solution for electronics, including a structural analysis application covering drop, shock, and vibration. The company also expanded startups’ access to its chip design software through its collaboration with the Midwest Microelectronics Consortium’s ScaleBridge Labs incubator.
Si2 launched LBC-bench, a public, open-source leaderboard that tracks how LLMs and AI agents perform on semiconductor design and verification tasks.
Real Intent released an AI agent for static sign-off tool workflows.
AI data centers/infrastructure
Skyworks Solutions uncorked network synchronizers for AI data centers and other time-sensitive communications infrastructure.
Astera Labs released 3.2T Ethernet smart retimers and redrivers for scale-up and scale-out AI infrastructure.
Cornelis Networks uncorked a reference network architecture for AI/HPC around its SuperNIC and AMD CPUs and GPUs.
Memory
California Memory Technologies announced an LPDDR5x memory simulation and verification platform.
Acrab debuted an SoC for edge AI that integrates CPU, GPU, and NPU resources with a unified memory architecture for large models.
CAST updated its xSPI serial memory controller IP core with AES encryption, AMBA power-state management, and programmable delay tuning.
Deployments
Speedata deployed Arteris‘ FlexNoC technology in its processor for large-scale data analytics workloads.
Ambiq expanded deployment of ChipAgents‘ agentic AI platform for designing and verifying its ultra-low power edge AI chips.
The Exploration Co. adopted Siemens‘ industrial software to develop reusable spacecraft.
Research
Cornell researchers showed that single-crystal niobium arsenide nanowires become more conductive as they shrink, offering a proof-of-concept alternative to copper interconnects at advanced nodes.
KAUST, MIT and other researchers showed that “a commercial 65nm CMOS process can be repurposed as a passive, foundry-manufacturable characterization platform by functionally partitioning its metal stack into microwave, thermal, and electrical subsystems within a 1 mm2 footprint.”
A UCSD team developed an in-storage retrieval accelerator that embeds vector-search functions directly into 3D NAND to lower latency and energy for retrieval-augmented AI workloads.
Princeton researchers proposed HW mechanisms for dynamically throttling AI performance, using microarchitecture-level controls such as cache way masking, bandwidth limits and latency insertion to constrain workloads at runtime.
ENISA published new healthcare cybersecurity procurement guidelines urging buyers to require HW security features, signed firmware updates, device certificates, vulnerability-disclosure commitments, and timely patching for medical devices and connected systems.
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre urged organizations to inventory systems that rely on cryptography and prepare for post-quantum migration, targeting completed plans by 2028, priority-system upgrades by 2031, and full migration by 2035.
Hacks and vulnerabilities
A hack of AI-music generation company Suno reportedly exposed 55 million customers’ private information and revealed that the AI tool had scraped music from sites like YouTube, Genius and Deezer amid several ongoing copyright lawsuits against the company.
A cyberattack temporarily suspended U.S. production at Coca-Cola-owned fairlife. The Anubis group later claimed responsibility and said it stole 1TB of data; Coca-Cola did not confirm that claim.
Researchers at DigiCert report that little progress has been made toward PQC security deployment, despite widespread testing and fast-approaching regulatory deadlines. While 87% of organizations report they are planning, testing, or implementing PQC initiatives, only 7% of organizations have deployed quantum-safe or hybrid cryptography across most of their digital certificates, according to the researchers.
Researchers at UCSD found that more than 2 million cars with anti-theft systems installed by dealers had been put at risk by a Bluetooth vulnerability that allowed thieves to unlock car doors using a smartphone app. The system developer released a patch for the issue this week.
AV-maker Zoox issued a software recall after one of its cars drove into an area clouded by heavy smoke from a nearby fire in Las Vegas.
Auto chips
NXP debuted the SAF9800, a new automotive audio and radio processor designed to simplify infotainment architectures. The company said the processor was built through integrating analog radio and AI/ML-enabled audio processing into a single-chip solution.
Autonomous, connectivity, sensors
US legislators advanced the Connected Vehicle Security Act of 2026, which would expand restrictions on Chinese-origin connected vehicles, SW, and HW beyond the existing BIS rule, adding new pressure on carmakers to scrub foreign-adversary technology from connected-car supply chains.
Waymo L4 driverless vehicles in SF, Phoenix, LA, and Austin had 68% fewer police-reportable crashes per mile and a 91% lower rate of rear-ending another vehicle when compared to human drivers, reports IIHS.
Sodium-ion batteries are nearing mass production as a cheaper, safer option for grid storage and lower-cost EVs, although their lower energy density limits wider use.
Sila raised $300M to speed up its silicon-carbon (Si/C) anode battery technology.
BC Hydro and the British Columbia government entered into a new partnership to triple the province’s EV charging infrastructure by 2035.
Vehicle research
UCLA, U. of Rochester, and others demonstrated a physics-based ML imaging system designed to capture details within “complex media.” The system more than doubled the signal-to-noise ratio compared to a previous generation of the technology, with researchers suggesting that the system could power advances in AV sensor and biomedical imaging technology.
AI Models On The Edge: Moving from LLMs in the cloud to SLMs at the edge is much more complicated than just slimming down the algorithms. It requires changes in both HW and SW, and the constraints can vary greatly from one market segment to another. Quadric’s Daniel Firu and Ravi Chakaravarthy talk about how to optimize NPUs for different applications, how to build in enough flexibility to keep designs from becoming obsolete too quickly, and how to leverage the benefits of open-source while still adding value.
Quantum
Hitachi is designing 100-qubit silicon quantum chips that will be fabricated on Intel Foundry’s 18A process.
Quantinuum and SoftBank published a roadmap to explore which quantum computing use cases will become feasible at what stage of hardware maturity.
Photon Queue raised $4M to build quantum memory devices that store photons directly in free-space optical loops.
Illinois received ~$30M in federal funding for quantum ecosystem development.
Workforce, Education
DHS’s final rule replaces open-ended “duration of status” for F, J and I nonimmigrants with fixed admission periods. Also, USCIS says it received enough petitions to meet both the 65,000 regular H-1B cap and the 20,000 advanced-degree exemption, or master’s cap, for FY 2027.
The UK now has a semiconductor scholarship track in its TechFirst program, offering students ~US$5K per year, industry connections and career support.
ASML plans to offer eligible employees a conditional stock grant worth €20,000 (about US$23K) if they remain with the company from 2027 through 2030, Reuters reports.
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.
With SRAM failing to scale in recent process nodes, the industry must assess its impact on all forms of computing. There are no easy solutions on the horizon.
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