Chip Industry Week In Review

Chinese firms imported almost $26 billion worth of chipmaking machinery, according to fresh trade data released by China’s General Administration of Customs this week, Bloomberg reports.

Meanwhile, the global semiconductor manufacturing industry continued to show signs of improvement in Q2 2024 with significant growth of IC sales, stabilizing capital expenditure, and an increase in installed wafer fab capacity, SEMI wrote in its Q2 2024 publication of the Semiconductor Manufacturing Monitor (SMM) Report.

The semiconductor industry is converging on 3.5D as the next best option in advanced packaging, a hybrid approach that includes stacking logic chiplets and bonding them separately to a substrate shared by other components.

AI and robotics are taking on bigger, more complex, and increasingly autonomous tasks in fabs, but integration with existing equipment and processes remains a formidable challenge.

TSMC plans to acquire Innolux’s 5.5G manufacturing facility in Tainan, Taiwan, for NT$17.14 billion (~US$531 million), per Focus Taiwan.

AMD plans to acquire ZT Systems to accelerate deployment of AMD AI rack scale systems with cloud and enterprise customers. The cash and stock transaction is valued at $4.9 billion.

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In-Depth
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Global

KoMiCo is developing a facility for advanced semiconductor equipment parts cleaning, coating, and repair in Mesa, Arizona, expected to be operational by 2026.

Mitsubishi Electric will begin shipping samples of its new 200Gbps PIN-photodiode (PD) chip for use in next-generation optical transceivers to support 800Gbps and 1.6Tbps fiber communication from October 1 this year, ideal for high-speed, high-capacity communication in data centers.

TSMC broke ground on its first European plant, in Dresden, Germany. The EU approved 5 billion euros ($5.5 billion) in funding for its development. When fully operational, ESMC is expected to have a monthly production capacity of 40,000 300mm (12-inch) wafers on TSMC’s 28/22 nanometer planar CMOS and 16/12 nanometer finFET process technology.

Wolfspeed is assessing the timing to close its 150mm device fab in Durham, North Carolina, since its 200mm device fab in Mohawk Valley, New York is producing solid results at significantly lower costs.

Illinois earmarked $20 million to invest in semiconductor, microelectronics, quantum, and advanced materials companies.

JEDEC published a new standard for LPDDR5/5X Serial Presence Detect (SPD) for standard memory modules.

Electronics manufacturing services (EMS) firm, Kaynes Technology, acquired land in Gujarat, India to set up an OSAT facility, per the Financial Express.

The government-controlled Shanghai Semiconductor Industry Investment Fund added 6.9 billion CNY (~$963 million) that will be used to finance semiconductor projects, according to the South China Morning Post.

ON Semi is diversifying its supply chain to protect itself from Chinese chip makers, according to the Wall Street Journal.

SEMI Korea is organizing the Advanced Packaging Summit 2024 on September 11 to present packaging technology roadmaps. Amkor will present on Advanced Packages for Chiplets.

Researchers at Oxford Internet Institute (part of Oxford University) and the London School of Economics examined how governments adopted Silicon Valley’s way of working, offering lessons as the UK government embraces AI and data science in public services.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) compared the U.S. and EU Chips Acts and outlined the regions’ future collaboration.

Non-compete agreements are back. A Texas court has reinstated them, per The National Law Review.

In-Depth

Tech Talks from Semiconductor Engineering this week:

• Next-Gen High-Speed Communication In Data Centers: New approaches to moving more data faster and more efficiently, with Cadence‘s Yang Zhang.
• Why Connectivity Is Changing Microcontrollers: The age of simple MCUs has given way to much more complex low-cost devices, with Infineon‘s Sivaram Trikutam.

Markets and Money

Xperi will sell its subsidiary Perceive to Amazon for $80 million in cash. Perceive makes edge AI inference processors for power-constrained markets such as wearables, laptops, and cameras for security, action capture, video analytics, and conferencing systems. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.

ASIC design services company Sondrel has delisted from the AIM stock market and will re-register as a private company.

Fujitsu Semiconductor Memory Solution will change its name to Ramxeed next year.

Futurum estimates the total market for AI processors and accelerators in data centers was $38B in 2023 and will grow to $138B by 2028.

The global foundry industry’s revenue grew about 9% QoQ and 23% YoY in Q2 2024, according to Counterpoint’s Foundry Quarterly Tracker. Other highlights: AI demand continues to be strong. CoWoS supply remained tight, with potential upsides in capacity expansions focusing on CoWoS-L going forward. Likely wafer price hikes for TSMC’s leading-edge nodes including 5/4nm and 3nm for 2025 bode well for the long-term growth of the foundry industry.

Global notebook shipments are expected to reach 173.65 million units in 2024, up 3.7% from 2023; global AR device shipments are expected to reach 25.5 million units by 2030 at a CAGR of 67% from 2023 to 2030; global sales of new energy vehicles (NEVs) hit 3.769 million units in Q1 2024, at almost 30% quarterly growth and a 24.2% YoY increase, per TrendForce.

Education and Training

Cadence Design Systems launched the Fem.AI initiative aiming to close the gender gap in the AI workforce. The Cadence Giving Foundation committed $20 million, including philanthropic and product donations over the next decade to organizations that align with its mission.

New York Governor Hochul announced a semiconductor R&D and workforce development agreement with the government of Hokkaido, Japan, aiming to boost cooperation between NY CREATES’ Albany NanoTech Complex and Rapidus.

New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Hokkaido University of Japan are collaborating on semiconductor education and research for semiconductor workforce development.

Micron is backing Syracuse University to launch a no-cost semiconductor program for military families, offered online or in-person on U.S. bases, per Syracuse.com

Security

The hardware security ecosystem is young and relatively small but could see a major boom in the coming years. As companies begin to acknowledge how vulnerable their hardware is, industry standards are being set, but must leave room for engineers to experiment.

NI/Emerson Ventures co-invested with Boulder Ventures in Symmera, an early-stage company simplifying device authentication and data protection, developing a scalable, highly available, and secure Distributed Intelligent Network (DIN) Orchestration Platform.

Fabric Cryptography raised $33 million in Series A funding to build a new type of processing unit and custom silicon chip that uses an instruction set architecture specific to cryptography. By using hardware-software co-design techniques, the startup aims to improve the speed and cost of running advanced cryptographic workloads such as zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption.

University of California San Diego computer scientists investigated a Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) protocol and found a vulnerability, with implications for enterprise and telecommunications networks.

The 2024 USENIX Security Symposium was held last week, featuring numerous hardware security technical papers including these Distinguished Paper Award Winners:

• HYPERPILL: Fuzzing for Hypervisor-bugs by Leveraging the Hardware Virtualization Interface (EPFL, Boston University, and Zhejiang University)
• Yes, One-Bit-Flip Matters! Universal DNN Model Inference Depletion with Runtime Code Fault Injection (Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, CSIRO’s Data61, University of Western Australia, and University of Waterloo)

Everspin will provide Frontgrade with MRAM technology, logic design, and BEOL manufacturing services to advance strategic radiation hardened (SRH) high-reliability eMRAM macro for future products, supporting the U.S. Department of Defense’s space system requirements.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is hosting a Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) proposers day on September 3 for companies that could develop an industrial-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer in the near term.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National Security Agency (NSA), Australian security organizations, and others released best practices for event logging and threat detection. CISA also issued a number of alerts/advisories.

Products and Cooling

NI/Emerson released its Rosemount 802 Wireless Multi-Discrete Input or Output Transmitter, providing flexibility for control and monitoring of field assets. It minimizes costs and improves safety by removing field technicians from hazardous areas.

The Orient Express Racing Team is using Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio and digital twins to prepare for the 37th America’s Cup sailing competition.

Fig. 1: Orient Express Racing Team uses Siemens Xcelerator software to create a digital twin. Source: Siemens. Image credit: Alexander Champy-McLean / Orient Express Racing Team

xMEMS Labs has announced the xMEMS XMC-2400 µCooling chip, allowing for active, fan-based micro-cooling (µCooling) at the chip level for the first time ever.

LiquidStack uncorked a line of coolant distribution units for direct-to-chip liquid cooling.

Apheros raised $1.85 million in pre-seed funding for metal foams that have high surface area and open porosity to boost the heat dissipation of high-performance liquid and two-phase cooling in data centers.

Research

USC Viterbi researchers demonstrated 3D x-ray imaging of ICs with a record 4nm resolution, offering potential for non-destructive metrology.

Diraq says it has demonstrated two-qubit gate accuracy of above 99% for its silicon CMOS quantum dot platform.

University of North Carolina researchers presented “A primordial DNA store and compute engine.”

Sandia National Laboratory physicists, Google Quantum AI researchers, and others successfully “produced a quantum algorithm to calculate electronic stopping powers in extreme conditions that are difficult to reliably create and measure in terrestrial labs,” according to a release.

Los Alamos National Laboratory and NSF’s Artificial Intelligence Institute for Advances in Optimization, or AI4OPT, at Georgia Institute of Technology, announced a research and educational partnership focused on AI tools for a next-generation power grid.

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

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