Chip Industry Week In Review

Siemens announced plans to acquire Altair Engineering, a provider of industrial simulation and analysis, data science, and high-performance computing (HPC) software, for about $10 billion. Altair’s software will become part of Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio and provide a boost to physics-based digital twins.

Onto Innovation bought Lumina Instruments, a San Jose, California-based maker of laser optical scanning systems. Onto says the technology will be used to identify defects smaller than 100nm. Onto also acquired the lithography business of Kulicke & Soffa, which includes 24 patents and 8 pending patents, aimed at extending panel-level substrate inspection.

The U.S. Department of Commerce announced the CHIPS for America EUV Accelerator facility will operate within NY CREATES Albany NanoTech Complex, with a proposed investment of $825 million. Also, Sunnyvale, California is the expected location for the second R&D flagship facility, focusing on chip design, EDA, architecture, hardware security, and workforce activities.

Infineon unveiled an ultrathin silicon power wafer. Thinning wafers to 20µm cuts substrate resistance in half and reduces power loss by 15%. The technology is aimed at AI server applications.

Fig. 1: Infineon’s ultra-thin silicon wafers are half as thick as current wafers. Source: Infineon

In other U.S. government news:

• NIST opened the CHIPS CARISSMA program, a $100 million fund for AI-powered research on sustainable semiconductor materials and processes. Eligible institutions can submit concept papers by January 13, 2025.

• The U.S. Department of the Treasury finalized rules that restrict certain U.S. investments in key technologies, including semiconductors, quantum information, and AI in “countries of concern,” including China, Hong Kong, and Macau, effective January 2, 2025.

• The Department of the Treasury also sanctioned 275 individuals and entities involved in supplying Russia with advanced technology and equipment, including an Indian pharma company Shreya who sold Dell‘s advanced servers with Nvidia AI-optimized h100 chips to Russia.

Further escalating the technology wars, the Chinese government is increasingly cutting off access to its rare earth metals and minerals, and restricting the information flow.

Despite the China-U.S. tensions, Intel is expanding its chip packaging and testing facility in Chengdu, China.

Apple introduced new chips this week for Mac computers, the M4 Pro and M4 Max, based on 3nm technology. The new chips, built for Apple Intelligence, offer better performance and 2X faster ray-tracing engine.

Special report this week: Device makers, equipment companies and materials suppliers are collaborating to find process flows that yield the best performance at lower cost so that non-leading-edge devices can take advantage of all that hybrid bonding has to offer. But the new technology is undergoing growing pains.

Quick links to more news:

In-Depth
Market Reports
Earnings Releases
Automotive
Security
Products and Standards
Research
Events and Further Reading

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Systems & Design newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:

• Chiplets Make Progress Using Interconnects As Glue
• HW and SW Architecture Approaches For Running AI Models
• RISC-V Conformance

More reporting this week:

• Hybrid Bonding Makes Strides Toward Manufacturability
• 2D Semiconductors Make Progress, But So Does Silicon

Markets and Money

The UK Advanced Research and Invention Agency is investing £50 million (~$65 million) into multiple projects to scale compute and reduce the cost of AI hardware. Alphawave Semi received a research grant under the new program to advance networking and interconnect technologies. Other recipients include imec, Signaloid, Normal Computing, Fractile, Rain AI, and numerous universities.

Merck KGaA completed its acquisition of Unity-SC, a provider of metrology and inspection tools for advanced packaging, MEMS, and unpatterned wafers. The deal is valued at €155 million (~$172 million), plus milestone payments.

Private investment company Ardian Semiconductor acquired Ion Beam Services, a French provider of ion implantation equipment for semiconductor front-end manufacturing.

NextSilicon emerged from stealth with $303 million in funding for its software-defined hardware accelerator, which tailors acceleration in real time to the unique needs of the high-performance compute application. Meanwhile, InBrain Neuroelectronics raised $50 million in Series B financing for its graphene-based brain-computer interface technology.

The European Innovation Council is investing €1.4 billion in deep tech and scaling strategic technologies in 2025. In addition, the EU’s Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking announced €127 million for 6G next-gen communications projects.

The DRAM industry is moving toward hybrid bonding for future high-bandwidth memory (HBM) generations, particularly the HBM5 20hi stack, according to TrendForce. While hybrid bonding offers benefits like higher data transmission, better heat dissipation, and reduced warpage due to thicker chip accommodation, challenges such as high investment costs, particle control, and yield-related inefficiencies pose obstacles.

The semiconductor foundry market is projected to reach $254 billion by 2032, up from $120 billion today. Growth of 8.8% YoY will be driven by rising demand for high-performance semiconductors in data centers, IoT, and automotive applications, according to a new report by Global Market Insights. The 300mm wafer segment is expected to see significant growth, with the Asia-Pacific region expected to lead the market due to its strong manufacturing infrastructure and government support.

Earnings Releases

Industry stock price impacts are here.

Automotive

The MIPI Alliance released an automotive camera security framework.

DENSO inked an agreement for an IP core license for Quadric‘s Chimera general-purpose NPU (GPNPU). The two companies will co-develop IP for an in-vehicle semiconductor.

Infineon launched an ASIL-D-compliant three-phase gate driver IC for braking systems and electric power steering in vehicles, suitable for safety-critical applications for 12 V brushless DC motors.

Keysight and Analog Devices collaborated on a test solution for Gigabit Multimedia Serial Link (GMSL2) devices, including developing Physical Medium Attachment (PMA) test methods and capabilities for the automotive interface.

The U.S. government announced $44.8 million in funding for research on ways to lower EV battery recycling costs.

Argonne National Laboratory researchers developed a way to boost the performance and reduce the cost of lithium-ion batteries.

CISPA researchers received more than €2 million from the German Federal Ministry of Digital and Transport for a project on autonomous vehicle security, aimed at making the processing of automotive sensor data more robust and secure.

TIER IV licensed Arteris‘ FlexNoC 5 interconnect IP and Magillem Connectivity SoC integration automation software for its next generation of autonomous driving SoCs.

Security

Recent security research:

• Hacking the Fabric: Targeting Partial Reconfiguration for Fault Injection in FPGA Fabrics (ASU, Karlsruhe IT)
• Evaluation of the Analyzability of Complex Secure Intellectual Property Using Fault Isolation Techniques versus the Hardware Security Threat They Pose (NXP)

DARPA is seeking proposals for its 2025 Young Faculty Award in fields such as quantum, cryptography, photonics, and materials and manufacturing, including semiconductor growth techniques that are independent of substrate lattice-constant.

CISA released its first-ever International Strategic Plan focused on how the agency will proactively engage international partners to strengthen the security and resilience of U.S. critical infrastructure. It also issued a number of alerts/advisories, including multiple Apple security updates.

Products and Standards

JEDEC published the LPDDR5 CAMM2 Connector Performance Standard, which aims to provide a standardized modular LPDDR5 solution with better signal integrity, lower power consumption, and smaller form factor compared to a DDR5 SODIMM connector.

The UALink Consortium is inviting companies to join its group to help “define a high-speed, low-latency interconnect for scale-up communications between accelerators and switches in AI pods & clusters.”

Infineon introduced a new brand, DEEPCRAFT, for its edge AI and ML software. Existing products, formerly Imagimob Studio and Imagimob Ready Models, will now be included under the new brand, along with an upcoming new range of edge AI/ML software tools, models, and solutions.

Arm will offer an extension for GitHub Copilot that provides AI-powered code suggestions to help developers build, test, and deploy software on Arm processors.

Siemens EDA will integrate CELUS‘ AI-driven PCB schematics and BOM automation with its next-generation PCB design solution as part of a fully integrated design environment.

Kioxia started mass production of Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 4.0 embedded flash memory devices with 4-bit-per-cell, quadruple-level cell (QLC) technology.

Research

imec reported on semi-damascene metallization as a possible inflection point in BEOL processing.

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers developed a new technique using metasurface alignment marks, a laser, and a camera to measure 3D misalignment between objects with sub-nanometer precision. The goal is to align 3D-integrated chips and optical systems.

DARPA awarded $3 million to the University of Michigan and collaborators to develop a method for growing defect-free III–V semiconductor layers on silicon, aiming to enable CMOS-compatible integration of high-performance materials without impurities by using a new catalyst-free growth technique. The initiative seeks to demonstrate the scalability of these materials for potential widespread use in electronics manufacturing.

In wearables and med tech:

• Hokkaido University and University of Tokyo researchers fabricated a flexible multimodal wearable sensor patch and developed edge computing software capable of detecting arrhythmia, coughs, and falls.
• University of Chicago researchers built a hydrogel semiconductor in a breakthrough for tissue-interfaced bioelectronics.
• MIT-CSAIL researchers made an interactive mouthpiece that can be fabricated with sensors and feedback components to capture in-mouth interactions and data.

In quantum:

• MIT researchers announced a method to generate synthetic electromagnetic fields on superconducting quantum processors to enhance simulations of material properties that arise under electromagnetic influence.
• Rice University researchers discovered magnetic and electronic properties in kagome magnet thin films that could transform quantum computing and superconductors.

IIT Delhi researchers fabricated Perovskite solar cells under ambient conditions with higher efficiency and stability.

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

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