Chip Industry Week In Review

President Biden announced four new Workforce Hubs to support the CHIPS Act and other initiatives, in Upstate New York, Michigan, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. The White House also provided economic context and progress updates for the President’s workforce strategy.

Samsung began mass production of its ninth-gen industry-first V-NAND chip. Along with one-terabit triple-level cell design, the chip features a 50% improvement in bit density and increased data input/output speeds of up to 3.2 gigabits per second.

TSMC announced new technologies and collaborations at its 30^th annual North American Technology Symposium, including:

• TSMC A16 Technology, combining TSMC’s Super Power Rail architecture with its nanosheet transistors, slated for production in 2026.
• TSMC NanoFlex Innovation for nanosheet transistors, providing designers with flexibility in N2 standard cells.
• N4C Technology, an extension of N4P technology with up to 8.5% die cost reduction and low adoption effort, scheduled for volume production in 2025.
• CoWoS, SoIC, and System-on-Wafer (TSMC-SoW), allowing a large array of dies on a 300mm wafer.
• Compact Universal Photonic Engine (COUPE), which stacks an electrical die on top of a photonic die.

Cadence’s digital solutions were certified for TSMC N2 design flow and its 3D-IC platform gained new features such as a hierarchical 3Dblox specification. Multiple Siemens products were certified for TSMC advanced processes including its Calibre nmPlatform for the N2 process and its Calibre 3DSTACK for the 3Dblox standard. Keysight, Synopsys, and Ansys teamed up for a radio frequency design migration flow for TSMC’s N6RF+ technology, using millimeter wave and RF solutions to deliver a more efficient solution for wireless integrated circuit applications. Ansys partnered with TSMC on its Compact Universal Photonic Engine, combining Ansys’ multiphysics solutions with Synopsys’ 3DIC Compiler to accelerate chip-to-chip and machine-to-machine communication. And Synopsys and TSMC collaborated on AI-driven design flows, photonic IC integration, and IP on 2nm technology.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) awarded Intel Foundry Phase Three of its Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes – Commercial (RAMP-C) program, advancing the tape-out and testing of early defense industrial base product prototypes using Intel’s 18A process.

Micron went into further detail about its $6.14 billion CHIPS Act funding, saying it also expects to benefit from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Investment Tax Credit, which provides a credit of 25% for qualified capital investments, as well as up to $5.5 billion available in incentives over the life of the project from the state of New York.

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In-Depth
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Research
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Markets and Money

NVIDIA will acquire Israel-based startup Run:ai, which promotes efficient cluster resource utilization for AI workloads. The company also is expected to announce the acquisition of Israel’s Deci, according to Business Orbital.

IBM will acquire multi-cloud infrastructure automation firm HashiCorp in a $6.4 billion deal to create an end-to-end hybrid cloud platform for AI-driven projects.

Renewable energy firm Exowatt unveiled a modular energy platform for data centers and received $20 million in seed funding from a16z, Atomic, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

In Indiana, USA, Amazon Web Services (AWS) will invest about $11 billion to build data centers and Toyota will invest $1.4 billion in its Princeton facility to build a new BEV and lithium-ion battery pack assembly line.

TECHSET is anticipating an 8% rebound in the semiconductor wet chemicals market in 2024, which will hit US $5.5 billion.

Shipments of QLC enterprise SSD will reach 30 exabytes in 2024, a quadrupling in volume over the previous year, TrendForce predicted. The increase in demand will be driven by the devices’ usefulness in AI applications, thanks to their fast read speeds and TCO advantages as well as more efficient power and storage capacity.

The radar module market across all sectors is expected to reach about US$36.5 billion by 2029 at a 5% CAGR from US$26.7 billion in 2023, reports Yole. The automotive radar market is predicted to grow at an annual rate of 9% to reach US$13.5 billion by 2029.

Sales of vehicles with Level 3 autonomy are expected to exceed 25,000 globally in 2024. China’s Level 3 installed base is expected to exceed 1 million by 2026, reaching 10% market share by 2028. Mercedes-Benz leads the market with Chinese OEMs approaching fast.

The neuromorphic sensing and computing markets revenue is expected to grow from US$28 million in 2024 to US$8.4 billion by 2034.

China’s smartphone sales grew 1.5% year over year in Q1 2024, reports Counterpoint. Huawei’s sales grew 69.7% YoY.

Global

SK hynix plans to expand production capacity of next-generation DRAM including HBM. The company will build the M15X fab in Cheongju, South Korea, and invest about 5.3 trillion won (~$14.6B) for fab construction.

Samsung will expand its U.S.-based capacity for AI semiconductor R&D, Business Korea reported. Sources said the company’s SAIT had established an Advanced Processor Lab in Silicon Valley dedicated to next-gen AI chip design, particularly RISC-V.

ROHM and ST expanded their multi-year, long-term 150mm silicon carbide (SiC) substrate wafers supply agreement with SiCrystal, a ROHM group company. The contract is for wafers manufactured in Nuremberg, Germany, for at least $230 million.

Malaysia plans to build a massive semiconductor design park in Selangor state, according to its Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and reported by France24, while Chief Minister Chow Kon Yeow said Penang was a magnet for back-end chip manufacturing and the introduction of Penang Silicon Island (PSI) will draw further investment, according to the Malay Mail.

Siemens Digital Industries Software partnered with Saigon Hi-Tech Park to nurture talent and promote semiconductor workforce development in Vietnam.

Qualcomm India president Savi Soin told CNBC the company already has chips designed end to end in India, and has more engineers there than anywhere else in the world. The company also announced the shortlisted startups for Qualcomm Make in Africa 2024.

The U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) is looking into the security implications of China‘s work in open-source RISC-V chips, according to a letter sent to U.S. lawmakers and seen by Reuters. And U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo downplayed Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro phone chip, claiming it is “years behind” and thus proof that export controls are working, on CBS 60 Minutes.

In China/Japan, Toyota is partnering with Tencent while Nissan is partnering with Baidu as they push AI and smart technology into cars destined for the Chinese market, reports CNBC.

In France, Pasqal and Welinq partnered on tailored quantum interconnects for neutral-atom quantum computing and CEA-Leti was chosen to coordinate two 6G projects by the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU), which provided a total of €130 million (~$139M) to 27 projects.

Google is expanding its R&D hub for hardware in Taiwan, according to NikkeiAsia.

Intel Ignite selected startups across the US, UK, and Europe to participate in its accelerator program for early-stage deep tech startups.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Systems and Design newsletter this week. Top articles include:

• EDA Looks Beyond Chips
• Dealing With AI/ML Uncertainty
• Is There Any Hope For Asynchronous Design?

Plus, check out these new stories and tech talks:

• Navigating The GPU Revolution
• Predicting And Preventing Process Drift

Security

MIT and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab researchers created a digital in-memory compute (IMC) ML accelerator that is resistant to side-channel attacks and bus-probing attacks, which only slightly slowed the device and did not affect accuracy, ideal for healthcare.

TXOne Networks launched its new cyber-physical systems (CPS) security platform, SageOne, to be presented at Hannover Messe, Netherlands and GISec Global, Dubai.

Toshiba Europe and Single Quantum tested and validated long-distance deployments of quantum key distribution (QKD) technology, which generates quantum secure keys immune to decryption by high performance conventional and quantum computers.

DARPA successfully tested autonomous movement on a new, much larger fleet vehicle.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced the Project 25 link layer encryption (LLE) informational session is available to view, and issued multiple alerts.

Product News

Rambus released its GDDR7 Memory Controller IP, which supports 40 Gbps operations, with 160 GBs per second throughput. The product is designed for high efficiency and low latency in a variety of scenarios and flexible AXI interface support.

Onto Innovation will release a new sub-surface inspection capability for the Dragonfly G3 sub-micron 2D/3D inspection and metrology platform, which will enable whole wafer inspection for critical yield impacting defects.

Infineon released its MOTIX TLE9140EQW gate driver IC for brushless DC motors, enabling easy migration from 12 V to 48 V systems with full support of functional safety requirements.

Qualcomm released Snapdragon X Plus featuring a 10 core Oryon CPU and a 45 TOPS NPU.

IBM introduced an entry-level all-flash storage platform with up to 1.81PBe of data (effective capacity) in a fully populated 1U form factor system, using 2:1 deduplication and 3:1 compression ratio.

SK keyfoundry launched an enhanced 0.13㎛ BCD process to enable automotive power fabless companies to design high-performance automotive semiconductor products.

Research

KU Leuven researchers demonstrated the feasibility of the foundry model for flexible, thin-film electronics.

NIST scientists modified a common lab refrigerator to chill materials faster using less energy, with potential for quantum computing and superconductors.

Argonne National Laboratory researchers incorporated a neural network into an X-ray microscope, in a technique called streaming ptychography, which enables researchers to analyze data in near real time.

EPFL researchers developed 3D-printable double network granular elastomers (DNGEs) to design flexible devices, soft actuators, sensors, robots, and wearables without heavy mechanical joints.

Princeton University and Meta researchers created a tiny optical device that makes holographic images larger and clearer, enabling a new immersive virtual reality display.

Caltech researchers developed an onboard ML-based control method to help aerial vehicles keep flying when rotors fail, called Neural-Fly for Fault Tolerance (NFFT).

Events

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

Further Reading

Read the latest special reports and top stories, or check out the latest newsletters:

Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials
Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing