Chip Industry Week In Review

The chip industry is still on track to hit $1 trillion annually by 2030, according to PWC‘s new State of the Semiconductor Industry report. Key drivers for growth are electrification, digitization, and faster deployment of AI and IoT technologies. Of particular note is the shift from predictive to generative AI, which can learn to create new content based on patterns in data, and which is expected to account for $58 billion of that $1 trillion by 2028.

China’s Xiaomi plans to use internally developed mobile processors in its phones next year, in keeping with China’s plan to be more self-sufficient in light of ongoing geopolitical tensions, according to Bloomberg.

The Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM) announced new bonding and inspection equipment, new materials, and a new core process for 600mm x 600mm fan-out panel-level packaging.

New U.S. government funding:

• Intel’s CHIPS Act funding was finalized for up to $7.9B, part of the company’s overall +$100B expansion plan.
• BAE Systems and Rocket Lab also finalized CHIPS Act funding. BAE will receive up to $35.5M to quadruple production capacity for MMIC chips in New Hampshire. Rocket Labs was awarded up to $23.9M to shore up supply of space-grade solar cells for power spacecrafts and satellites with expansion of its New Mexico facility.

Samsung Electronics announced new leadership in its memory and foundry divisions:

• Young Hyun Jun, vice chairman and head of the Device Solutions Division, was named co-CEO and will also become the head of the memory business and Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology;
• Jinman Han was promoted to president and will lead the foundry business, and
• Seok Woo Nam will become CTO of the foundry business.

CSIS analyzed Chinese policy documents and market share data and issued a new report, “The True Impact of Allied Export Controls on the U.S. and Chinese Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment Industries.” The think tank also reported on immigration policy solutions to U.S. critical sector workforce shortages.

The South Korea government is planning more than US$10B in financial support for its domestic chip industry in 2025, as well as increases in tax credits and an AI computing center by 2030.

Special Report: Chiplets are gaining widespread attention across the semiconductor industry, but for this approach to really take off commercially it will require more standards, better modeling technologies and methodologies, and a hefty amount of investment and experimentation.

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Markets and Money
Security
Automotive
Product News
Quantum
Events and Further Reading

Markets and Money

New deals:

• Nova plans to acquire German-based wafer metrology tool company Sentronics Metrology for $60M.
• Valeo and ROHM are co-developing power modules for electric motor inverters.
• Two French companies, Diamfab and HiQuTe Diamond, are teaming up to make diamond semiconductors for power electronics.

Analyst reports:

• Overall foundry industry revenue increased 10% in Q3 versus the prior quarter, and 27% YoY, with TSMC increasing its overall market share to 64% in Q3 2024, reports Counterpoint.
• NAND flash revenue increased nearly 5% to US$17.6B versus the prior quarter, driven by strong enterprise SSD demand, reports TrendForce.
• Global DRAM industry revenue reached $26 billion in Q3, driven by demand for DDR5 and HBM in data centers, per Trendforce.

Recent fundings include:

• AlixLabs will receive €345,000 from Swedish innovation company Vinnova to commercialize its atomic layer etch pitch splitting technology.
• Panmnesia raised over $60M in Series A funding to manufacture its CXL 3.1 switch silicon chip and further develop its CXL IP.
• Iontra raised $45M Series C funding for its integrated RISC-V charge control and fuel gauge microcontroller.
• Lightsynq emerged from stealth with $18M in Series A funding to develop optical quantum interconnects that enable hardware providers to link quantum processors.
• Vishay is investing another £51m into the former Newport Wafer Fab semiconductor plant in Wales, now branded Newport Vishay.

Sagence AI emerged from stealth to debut its analog in-memory compute architecture for AI inference.

Earnings releases this week: Analog Devices.

In-Depth

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

• Special Report: Top-Down Vs. Bottom-Up Chiplet Design
• Slow Progress On Generative EDA
• How AI Is Transforming System Design

More reporting this week:

• Aging, Complexity, And AI In Analog Design

Global

STMicroelectronics plans to use Chinese foundry Hua Hong Semiconductor to make its 40nm industrial MCUs, starting next year.

Canada-based photonics developer POET Technologies is expanding its optical engine production capacity in Malaysia.

Malta is establishing a Semiconductor Competence Centre at the University of Malta, co-funded with €4M in EU funds and €4M in government funding. It’s not the only semiconductor company on the 122 square-mile island nation, located off the southern coast of Sicily. STMicroelectronics built an assembly plant in Malta in 1981, which now employs 1,800 people.

Japan’s JX Advanced Metals opened its new advanced sputtering plant in Mesa, Arizona.

Tokyo University of Science researchers had a breakthrough in demonstrating transverse thermoelectric conversion in tungsten disilicide (WSi2), leading to more efficient thermoelectric devices.

Security

Recent security research:

• Hardware Security Attack Landscape and Countermeasures
• When Data Shines – Leaking Data from Microcontrollers Through Photon Emission Analysis (CEA-LETI et al.)
• Practical Fault Injection Attacks on Constant Time CSIDH and Mitigation Techniques (Virginia Tech)
• TENDRA: Targeted Endurance Attack on STT-RAM LLC (IIT Ropar, et al.)
• Acoustic Eavesdropping Attack Using Self-Mixing Laser Interferometer (University of Electro-Communications)

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

Automotive

Rivian received a conditional commitment for a loan of up to $6.6 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, which would be used to build a facility in Stanton Springs North, Georgia.

Infineon introduced a family of full-bridge transformer drivers for IGBT and SiC MOSFET gate driver power supplies, and SiC and GaN power switches. Target markets include EV charging, solar, energy storage systems, and more.

Imagination’s DXS GPU IP was independently certified as ISO 26262 ASIL-B compliant by SGS-TÜV Saar. The GPU’s functional safety technology, Distributed Safety Mechanisms, effectively eliminates the PPA overheads of meeting ASIL-B requirements.

Robert Bosch RTC researchers published a technical paper about intrusion detection in auto MCUs.

Automotive OEMs are looking to build an OS ecosystem as SDVs have created a new subscription-based revenue stream, reports Counterpoint.

Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis are recalling many 2022-24 EVs because they may suddenly lose power while in motion, owing to a faulty integrated charging control unit (ICCU), per Consumer Reports. This is the second recall for this problem.

In battery news, Argonne National Laboratory is leading a $50 million consortium focused on sodium-ion batteries while Caltech researchers devised a method for coating lithium-ion battery cathodes with graphene.

Product News

Siemens’ Solido SPICE software is now certified on Samsung Foundry’s leading edge process technologies.

Israel’s Tower Semiconductor released its 300mm silicon photonics process as a standard foundry offering.

Rebellions selected Alphawave Semi’s multi-protocol I/O connectivity chiplets for its next-generation composable AI accelerator SoC. The I/O chiplet integrates Alphawave’s PCIe 6.0, CXL 3.1, and Ethernet subsystems with UCIe 2.0 die-to-die connectivity.

SureCore began licensing a suite of memory IP capable of operating from 77K down to the near absolute zero temperatures required for quantum computing applications.

Quantum

SemiQon released a CMOS transistor optimized for cryogenic conditions. The new transistor allows quantum computing control and readout electronics to be placed directly inside a cryostat alongside the processors without causing disruption from heat dissipation.

Q.ANT launched a photonic processor for energy-efficient HPC and real-time AI applications. The processor executes complex, non-linear mathematics natively using light and includes a PCIe interface.

Alice & Bob debuted a logical qubit emulator as part of a toolbox for working with fault-tolerant quantum algorithms and predicting the behavior of logical qubits. It is built on top of IBM’s Qiskit.

Orange Quantum Systems unveiled new test equipment that can characterize quantum chips with 100+ qubits.

Quantum Circuits uncorked an 8-qubit quantum processor that uses error-detecting dual-rail cavity qubits.

NTU Singapore researchers discovered they could tune the van Hove singularity energy levels of two topological materials, opening the door to engineering quantum materials with novel properties.

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