Chip Industry Week In Review

Synopsys agreed to sell its Optical Solutions Group to Keysight for an undisclosed amount, in a deal deemed necessary for Synopsys to win regulatory approval for its planned acquisition of Ansys. The sale to Keysight is contingent on the Synopsys-Ansys deal going through. Meanwhile, Ansys has its own optical business.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) made the first awards for Microelectronics Commons projects — $269 million for 33 projects involving secure IoT, 5G/6G, AI hardware, quantum tech, and electromagnetic warfare. Included is a cross-hub EDA solution that provides access to Cadence, Synopsys, Siemens, Keysight, and Ansys tools.

The DoD and Department of Commerce awarded Intel up to $3 billion in direct funding under the CHIPS Act for the Secure Enclave program to manufacture leading-edge semiconductors for the U.S. government.

Intel announced it will establish Intel Foundry as an independent subsidiary inside the company. In addition, it will delay new fab projects in Poland and Germany by about two years. Plans for projects in the U.S. are still in place. In addition, Intel plans to sell part of its stake in Altera, which it acquired in 2015 and transitioned to a standalone business earlier this year, while anticipating an IPO on the horizon for the FPGA maker. Finally, Intel announced it will produce an AI fabric chip for AWS on Intel 18A.

Semiconductor Engineering published a new eBook: Memory Fundamentals For Engineers. Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what’s changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and what are the limitations of each memory type.

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Money and Market Reports
Education and Training
Security
Product News
People
Events and Further Reading

Global

Analog Devices (ADI) announced a strategic alliance with Tata Group to explore semiconductor manufacturing opportunities in India, with Tata Motors, and Tejas Networks signing a memorandum of understanding with ADI. The partnership aims to align strategic roadmaps and leverage ADI’s semiconductor solutions in Tata’s electric vehicles and network infrastructure applications.

Lam Research broke ground on a systems lab at its India Center for Engineering in Bengaluru.

imec and 13 European partners developed a high-performance lithium-metal solid-state battery, featuring a liquid-to-solid processed solid electrolyte with an energy density of 1070 Wh/L, compared to 800 Wh/L for state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries. (Read more about lithium batteries.)

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek announced plans to add 373 acres of land near the Hillsboro Technology Park to attract semiconductor investments. The land would be adjacent to an existing semiconductor cluster anchored by Intel.

Advanced Energy opened a design and service center in Wilmington, Massachusetts, focusing on advanced power technologies for semiconductors and other applications.

China-based SMIC‘s patent application for an EUV radiation generator and lithography equipment was made public this month (filed in March 2023).

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Manufacturing, Packaging & Materials newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:

• How Die Dimensions Challenge Assembly Processes
• New Materials Are in High Demand
• Managing EMI in High-Density Integration

More reporting this week:

• CXL Thriving As Memory Link
• What Comes After HBM For Chiplets

Money and Market Reports

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $42.4 million in grants for the Future of Semiconductors (FuSe2) competition. The competition is a collaboration with Ericsson, Intel, Micron, and Samsung aimed at advancing semiconductor technologies and addressing challenges in performance, energy efficiency, and supply chains.

The U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) awarded nearly $5 million for the development of semiconductor metrology technology to 17 small businesses across nine states. The SBIR Phase I awards aim to explore the feasibility of innovative ideas and technologies that could lead to commercial microelectronics products.

Swiss photonics startup Lightium secured $7 million in seed funding to advance the commercialization of its thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonic integrated circuits (PICs) foundry services. TFLN-based photonic chips offer enhanced data transmission speeds and energy efficiency, enabling data rates up to 3.2 Tb/s.

Edge AI company Syntiant will acquire Knowles Corp.’s consumer MEMS microphones business for $150 million in cash and stock. The acquisition would give Syntiant a complete solution for always-on audio and speech applications.

The wafer foundry market is expected to grow 20% in 2025, driven by AI deployment and supply chain recovery, according to TrendForce.

The semiconductor quartz fabricated parts market is expected to rebound by nearly 6% in 2024 due to fab expansions and increases in etch and CVD steps for advanced technology nodes, according to TECHCET.

The optical metasurfaces industry is expected to grow from $62 million in 2023 to $1.925 billion by 2029, driven by applications such as AR glasses and smart phones, reports Yole. Nanoimprint lithography (NIL) has emerged as an alternative to conventional semiconductor fabrication methods.

See how the interest rates changes are impacting industry stocks, plus other chip industry news.

Education and Training

Texas Instruments is teaming up with Georgia Tech to allow students to access its analog process technology and 300mm wafer fabrication capabilities, with student designs sent for manufacturing in TI’s newest wafer fab in Richardson, Texas.

New York University (NYU) and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) are introducing a graduate program for a joint degree in AI with shared R&D, curriculum development, a student exchange, and cross-accreditation.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $48 million to the NSF Broadening Participation in Computing Alliances (NSF BPC Alliances), aiming to increase participation of underrepresented groups in computer and information science and engineering.

Security

Keysight’s Riscure device security research lab worked with Autotalks to test the security of a vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication solution under the Common Criteria certification program.

Infineon and Oxford Ionics were one of three consortia selected to build a mobile quantum computer by the German Agency for Innovation in Cybersecurity (Cyberagentur). The German Federal Ministries of the Interior and Defence is investing a total of €35 million ($39 million) in the R&D project. One system will be chosen for further development for practical use, based on co-developed quantum processing units (QPUs).

Fig. 1: Engineer with quantum chip in Ion trap laboratory from Infineon in Villach/Austria. Source: Infineon

Purdue University engineers developed a patent-pending optical counterfeit detection method called RAPTOR, or residual attention-based processing of tampered optical responses, which leverages deep learning to improve on existing methods.

The EU Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) announced the publication of ENISA Threat Landscape 2024 during its Threathunt 2030 conference in Athens.

DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) is seeking proposals on technologies focused at the intersection of AI and biotech.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a Secure by Design alert about eliminating cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. And CISA issued a number of other alerts/advisories.

People

Expedera appointed Siyad Ma as CEO. A co-founder of the company, Ma was formerly vice president of engineering. He replaces Da Chuang, who will transition to Executive Chairman.

Arm CEO Rene Haas is hosting a new custom podcast series “Tech Unheard,” where fellow industry leaders and policy makers join him in one-on-one conversations, starting October 9.

Arteris announced that Joachim Kunkel, a former general manager of Synopsys’ IP business unit, will join its board of directors.

Marvell co-founder and Alphawave executive director Sehat Sutardja has passed away.

Lattice Semiconductor appointed Ford Tamer as CEO. Tamer was previously president and CEO of Inphi.

Industry veterans Anantha Chandrakasan and Michael Splinter joined Natcast‘s board.

Product News

Keysight launched a new Optical Reference Transmitter designed for testing, compliance validation, and interoperability assurance of 200G-per-lane optical receivers and research into 400G-per-lane transmission. It can generate both clean and stressed signals for testing optical receiver designs up to 120 GBd per lane. Keysight also debuted a configurable vector network analyzer (VNA), featuring four RF signal sources, two internal combiners, and two low-noise receivers in a single instrument that accelerates component characterization.

Keysight and Google Quantum AI introduced Quantum Circuit Simulation, a circuit design environment with frequency-domain flux quantization that aims to speed up the development of quantum circuits.

Emerson expanded its NI USB data acquisition (DAQ) product line with a new NI mioDAQ device, offering improved measurement performance, more powerful software, and an easier setup experience to help reduce time-to-market.

Arm integrated its Kleidi AI acceleration technology with PyTorch and ExecuTorch, enabling apps to run large language models on Arm CPUs.

Infineon introduced a XENSIV PAS CO2 5V sensor based on photoacoustic spectroscopy (PAS) technology, improving energy efficiency by adapting ventilation to actual occupancy, suitable for HVAC systems and IoT or smart consumer devices. The company also released SECORA Pay Bio, a biometric payment card that complies with Visa and Mastercard, integrating Infineon’s SLC39B SoC Secure Element and the FPC1323 sensor by Fingerprint Cards AB into its Biometric Coil on Module (BCoM) package.

SK keyfoundry recently launched its fourth-generation(Gen4) 0.18㎛ BCD process for mobile and automotive applications.

Teradyne Robotics and Siemens are jointly developing a robotics showcase at MxD (Manufacturing x Digital) in Chicago, highlighting advanced automation and AI-driven robotics. The collaboration, part of a broader partnership between Teradyne and Siemens, will feature demonstrations of Teradyne’s Universal Robots cobots and MiR autonomous mobile robots in a simulated factory environment.

Chalmers University and Siemens EDA collaborated on a project to determine a historical ship’s resistance at full scale, a crucial step for designing energy-efficient vessels. The team used computational fluid dynamics (CFD) instead of the International Towing Tank Conference (ITTC) recommended procedure.

NXP used two of Cadence‘s Tensilica HiFi 5 digital signal processors in its SAF9xxx series, addressing the need for sophisticated audio processing to support traditional DSP tasks and AI/ML applications in next-gen software-defined vehicles.

Thalia debuted its AI-powered layout porting software, which maintains floorplan placement and preserves all intelligence generated on the existing IP through silicon validation.

SiFive launched a series of RISC-V IP for accelerating high performance AI workloads.

TeraSignal introduced an intelligent chip-to-module (C2M) interconnect designed for data transmission between large ASICs and linear optical modules. The interconnect automates link training and performance monitoring without the need for additional DSPs.

NewPhotonics announced a photonic IC transmitter on chip at 1.6Tbps for DSP-based optical transceiver modules.

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

Semiconductor Engineering’s latest newsletters:

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