Chip Industry Week In Review

Infineon rolled out the world’s first 300mm gallium nitride (GaN) wafer, opening the door for high-volume manufacturing of GaN-based power semiconductors. A 300mm wafer contains 2.3 times as many chips per wafer as a 200mm wafer.

Fig.1: Infineon’s 300mm GaN wafer. Source: Infineon

The Semiconductor Industry Association released its 2024 State of the U.S. Semiconductor Industry report this week, highlighting opportunities for growth, current and emerging challenges, and interesting metrics.

Samsung started mass production of its 1Tb quad-level vertical NAND (V-NAND).

The U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) proposed a mandatory reporting requirement for AI developers and cloud providers. Included are  developmental activities, cybersecurity measures, and results from red-teaming efforts, such as testing for the ability to assist in cyberattacks or lower the barriers to entry for non-experts to develop chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons.

Special Report: Defect Challenges Grow At The Wafer Edge. Better measurement of edge defects can enable higher yield while preventing catastrophic wafer breakage, but the number of possible defects is increasing.

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
This Week’s Conferences
Money
Education and Training
Security
Product and Standards
Automotive and Batteries
Quantum
Events and Further Reading

Global

Hyperion aims to build a 600,000 sq-ft facility to manufacture high-density interconnect IC substrates in Peoria, Arizona, per AZ Central.

U.S. CHIPS Act funding for Intel may be delayed, unless performance meets previously agreed upon expectations, according to Bloomberg.

Polymatech and the ECM Group are forming a joint venture for semiconductor wafer fabrication in Grenoble, France, focusing on sapphire ingots and wafers.

Move2THz, a 27-member EU consortium led by Soitec, aims to develop a future generation of high-frequency semiconductors based on indium phosphide.

Amazon Web Services plans to invest more than $10 billion into building and operating new UK data centers over the next five years.

China’s expanding export controls are a rising concern in the semiconductor industry, particularly graphite, germanium, and rare earth elements, according to TECHCET.  The recent antimony export restrictions will force the U.S. to secure non-Chinese sources. Also, Nikkei Asia analyzed what the upcoming U.S. election may mean for U.S. sanctions on China.

Huawei, meanwhile, released a tri-fold phone, built with SMIC chips.

Brooks Instrument opened its new manufacturing facility in Malaysia, producing mass-flow controllers.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Low Power-High Performance newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:

• Is PPA Relevant Today?
• Higher Density, More Data Create New Bottlenecks In AI Chips
• The Challenges of Upgrading Lithium Batteries
• Striking A Balance On Efficiency, Performance, And Cost

And its Test, Measurement & Analytics newsletter featured these reports:

• Promises and Perils of Parallel Test
• Defect Challenges Grow At The Wafer Edge
• Standardizing Fault Coverage In Analog/Mixed Signal Test

This Week’s Conferences

India’s semiconductor industry is abuzz, fueled by SEMICON India:

• India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the conference this week, vowing the government’s commitment to strengthen the sector.
• SEMI unfurled a new Workforce Development Program and an agreement with IESA, the leading industry body representing the semiconductor sector in India.
• India’s L&T Semiconductor Technologies is collaborating with IBM on R&D to design advanced processors.
• The U.S. State Department is partnering with India’s government and others to grow and diversify the global semiconductor ecosystem under the ITSI Fund, created by the CHIPS Act.
• NXP CEO Kurt Sievers committed to invest more than $1 billion in India, doubling its R&D efforts.

Apple uncorked several announcements at its September Event:

•  The iPhone 16 will be powered by Apple’s A18 chip, based on Arm’s V9 core, with AI-enhanced functionality.
• The much thinner Apple Watch series 10 will feature 18-hour battery life with faster charging, SiP with a 4-core neural engine, brighter larger wide angle OLED display, and sleep apnea alerts.
• AirPods 4 now offer USB-C charging and 24-hour battery life, and the AirPods Pro 2 features clinical-grade hearing aid capability.

The AI Hardware & Edge AI Summit served as a launchpad for a slew of startups and established companies:

• SiMa.ai unveiled its multi-modal edge AI product family for running GenAI on a single chip.
• Applied Brain Research showed off a single-chip speech recognition solution.

Enfabrica‘s SuperNIC AI solution (R) and Positron.ai‘s transformer inferences device (L) from the AI Hardware & Edge AI Summit. Photos: Semiconductor Engineering

Money

IDC expects worldwide spending on edge computing to reach $378 billion by 2028. “As the focus of AI shifts from training to inference, edge computing will be required to address the need for reduced latency and enhanced privacy,” said Dave McCarthy, IDC research vice president, in the release.

The global power electronics market, including discrete devices and modules, is projected to grow at a CAGR of 7% from 2023 to 2029 to US$35.7 billion in 2029, according to Yole.

The SiC device market will reach nearly US$10 billion by 2029, with a CAGR of 24% from 2023 to 2029, with key players focused on the transition to 8-inch wafers, Yole said.

NAND flash shipments growth slowed in 2Q24, but revenue is up 14%, driven by AI SSD demand, per TrendForce.

The U.S. Department of Energy:

• Awarded $65 million in quantum computing funding for 10 projects focused on end-to-end software toolchains.
• Selected 91 early career scientists from across the country to receive a combined $138 million research funding for AI, fusion energy, and quantum.
• Announced a $23 million R&D opportunity from its Office of Science, to be led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), to advance future supercomputers.

Product and Standards

JEDEC published a new standard to address switching energy loss in wide-bandgap and silicon power devices.

Synopsys launched its ImSym Imaging System Simulator, a virtual prototype for imaging systems, sensors, and image signal processors. The tool is powered by CODE V and LightTools optical design software. The company also introduced a complete UCIe IP solution operating at up to 40 Gbps per pin to address the increased compute performance demands of AI data centers.

Rambus released its HBM4 Memory Controller IP for cutting-edge AI accelerators, graphics, and HPC applications. The controller supports JEDEC Spec of 6.4 Gbps and offers 2.56 TB/s throughput to each memory device.

Infineon introduced its StrongIRFET 2 power MOSFET 30 V portfolio for such applications as industrial switched-mode power supplies (SMPS), motor drives, battery-powered applications, battery management systems, and uninterruptible power supplies.

Bruker uncorked its Dektak ProTM stylus profilometer, the next-gen profiler in the Dektak product line. The  new benchtop system provides an expanded measurement area up to 200mm of full-sample access for semiconductor applications, as well as a shortened time to results with better accuracy.

VeriSilicon licensed Arteris’ FlexNoC 5 interconnect IP. The company said the product will be used to optimize NoC interconnect logic and physical layouts for efficient chip designs.

Tenstorrent licensed Movellus’ digital IP products for its AI and HPC chiplet solution.

Education and Training

Axiomise launched its new Essential Introduction to Practical Formal Verification training program. The course is presented by company founder Ashish Darbari and focuses on the use of SystemVerilog Assertions in real-world design challenges.

Stanford’s School of Engineering, in collaboration with TSMC, will renovate and expand the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility.

UC Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara City College partnered to expand workforce pathways for micro/nanotechnology and semiconductor manufacturing by giving SBCC students access to UCSB’s cleanroom training. The program is supported by NSF’s Division of Undergraduate Education’s Advanced Technological Education program and Intel.

Coe College received a $225,000 grant from NASA to buy an HPC cluster, featuring 1,024 CPU cores and 8 NVIDIA RTX 600 ADA GPUs, an advanced cooling system, and software including COMSOL Multiphysics with a plasma module. The goal is to provide students and faculty with tools for capabilities in physics, data analytics, and engineering.

Security

Finland’s Xiphera unveiled a project to develop quantum-resilient authenticated boot and hardware root-of-trust for space-grade chip architectures.

Recent security research:

• Obsidian: Cooperative State-Space Exploration for Performant Inference on Secure ML Accelerators (UT Austin, Arm)
• Closing the Gap: Leakage Contracts for Processors with Transitions and Glitches (TU Graz)
• A robust deep learning attack immune MRAM-based physical unclonable function (Shahid Beheshti Univ., George Washington Univ., Univ. de Sherbrooke)
• Password-Protected Key Retrieval with(out) HSM Protection (IBM Research Europe, ETH Zurich, Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Hasso Plattner Institute)
• TrojanForge: Generating Adversarial Hardware Trojan Examples Using Reinforcement Learning (New Mexico State Univ., Miami Univ., North Carolina A&T State Univ.)

Aliro will provide U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory with software and professional services that will enable AFRL to simulate, test, and operate entanglement-based quantum network infrastructure, including heterogeneous qubit platforms.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a number of alerts/advisories.

Automotive and Batteries

The ZF Group and Infineon jointly developed and implemented AI algorithms to optimize software and control units for driving dynamics as part of the EEmotion project, co-funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. Infineon’s AURIX TC4x MCU from Infineon enables AI algorithms thanks to Parallel Processing Unit (PPU).

Honda invested an undisclosed sum in SiLC to develop next-gen FMCW LiDAR solutions for all types of mobility. (Read more about LiDAR in this recent report.)

The ongoing electrification of everyday items has resulted in the proliferation of batteries and spurred continued development for automotive and grid use. Safety and energy density are prime motivators as researchers seek to improve lithium batteries.

China developed a technology to access a new source of minerals for EV batteries, starting in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.

Quantum

IonQ and the University of Maryland signed a $9 million partnership to provide quantum computing access at the National Quantum Lab at Maryland (QLab) for affiliated students, faculty, researchers, staff, and partners to work with IonQ’s scientists and engineers.

Quantinuum unveiled a roadmap to universal, fully fault-tolerant quantum computing by 2030.

IonQ announced it has surpassed 99.9% two-qubit gate fidelity on one of its barium development platforms. The company said the breakthrough will enable it to identify and remove error mechanisms in its large quantum systems.

Israel-based Quantum Source raised $50 million in Series A Funding for scalable, useful quantum computing.

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

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