Chip Industry Week In Review

The 2024 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) was held this week, prompting a number of announcements from:

• imec:
  • Proposed a new CFET-based standard cell architecture for the A7 node containing two rows of CFETs with a shared signal routing wall in between, allowing standard cell heights to be reduced from 4 to 3.5T, compared to single-row CFETs.
  • Integrated indium phosphide chiplets on a 300mm RF silicon interposer.
  • Created three critical building blocks of a superconducting digital circuit.
  • Proposed 3D charge-coupled device with IGZO channel as buffer memory for data-intensive compute applications.
• Intel used subtractive ruthenium metallization to reduce capacitance of interconnects by 25%. The approach uses a combination of thin film resisitivity plus airgaps, which company says is more cost-efficient for high-volume manufacturing. It also proposed selective layer transfer for fast heterogeneous chip-to-chip assembly in advanced packaging, and noted gate-all-around advances for 2D FETs that extend beyond CFETs.
• TSMC presented 19 papers on topics including 2nm nanosheets, CFETs, alternative channel materials, 3D-IC, TMDs, 2D material device advancements, and semiconducting oxides.
• CEA-Leti demonstrated a scalable hafnia-zirconia-based ferroelectric capacitor platform integrated into the BEOL at the 22nm FD-SOI node for embedded applications. The research institute also developed a device able to sense light and modulate it accordingly in a single device, using a liquid crystal cell and a CMOS image sensor.
•  Kioxia developed a new type of DRAM, comprised of an oxide-semiconductor transistor, which simultaneously has a high ON current, and low OFF current. Called OCTRAM, it is expected to be deployed in AI, post-5G comms systems, and IoT devices.

Rapidus announced new and updates to existing partnerships with:

• Synopsys on a new approach to natively model process sensitivity and variation in the design steps, reducing the need for re-characterization of libraries and memories during different phases of the process evolution.
• Cadence to develop AI-driven reference design flows and an IP portfolio for the latter’s 2nm GAA process. The deal will also see the two companies taking advantage of Rapidus’ backside power delivery network tech.
• IBM on another step toward fabricating 2nm chips at scale by using two different strategies for selective nanosheet layer reduction to build nanosheet gate-all-around transistors with multiple threshold voltages.

Synopsys also unveiled its Ultra Ethernet IP, which can enable 1.6 Tb/s of bandwidth to up to 1 million endpoints. The company also announced its UALink IP solutions, which includes controllers, PHYs, and verification IP, with up to 200 Gbps throughput per lane.

IBM designed a process for co-packaged optics that uses polymer optical waveguides, enabling the addition of six times as many optical fibers at the edge of a silicon photonics chip compared to current CPO.

In U.S. government news:

• The Department of Commerce awarded Micron Technology up to $6.1 billion in CHIPS Act funding to support expansion of leading-edge DRAM production in Idaho and New York. An additional $275 million in proposed funding would support modernization of a Virginia facility for the company’s 1-alpha DRAM process.
• The Office of Management and Budget is seeking input on ways to incentivize government contractors to scale up their use of domestically manufactured chips.

SEMI reports that global sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment by OEMs are set for a record $113 billion in 2024, growing 6.5% year over year. The organization anticipates the market will reach $121 billion in 2025 and $139 billion in 2026.

Lam Research introduced a collaborative robot (cobot) for the semiconductor industry that is designed to perform critical maintenance tasks on wafer fabrication equipment repeatability with sub-micron precision. It currently supports Lam’s dielectric etch tools and will expand to additional tools.

Fig. 1: A collaborative robot. Source: Lam Research

Special Report: Automotive chips are aging significantly faster than expected in hot climates with sustained high temperatures, raising concerns about the reliability of electrified vehicles over time and whether advanced-node chips are the right choice for safety-critical applications.

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Markets and Money
Security
Products and Partnerships
Research
Automotive
Education and Training
Events and Further Reading

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Test, Measurement & Analytics newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:

• Aftermarket Sensors Boost Yield In Wafer Fabs
• Silicon Lifecycle Management Gains Steam
• Testing For Thermal Issues Becomes More Difficult

And its Low Power-High Performance newsletter featured these articles:

• Is In-Memory Compute Still Alive?
• Chiplet Interconnects Add Power And Signal Integrity Issues
• Where Is The Software For Shift Left?

More reporting this week:

• Special Report: Auto Chip Aging Accelerates In Hot Climates
• Why Chips Fail, And What To Do About It

Global

China is ramping up imports of U.S. chips ahead of new trade restrictions, importing 14.8% more ICs (501.5 billion) from January to November than it did in the same period last year, reported SCMP. And China’s top design tool maker Empyrean Technology is handing control of its board to a state-owned enterprise after U.S. blacklisting.

TSMC issued its November 2024 revenue report, reflecting a 12% decrease from the prior month, but a 34% increase from November 2023.

IC design services firm Microip went public on Taiwan’s Emerging Stock Market.

CSIS published a report, “Silicon Surrender: How Ending Russian Electronics Imports Supports Negotiations,” and Bloomberg reported on how Russia’s military is buying U.S. chips. Meanwhile, Russia partnered with BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) to create an AI alliance.

ITIF reported on why tariffs won’t save U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.

UMC’s collaboration with suppliers to build a sustainable supply chain contributed to 2.64 million tons of carbon reduction.

Markets and Money

Acquisition news:

• Onsemi will acquire Qorvo’s Silicon Carbide Junction Field-Effect Transistor (SiC JFET) business, including the United Silicon Carbide subsidiary, for $115 million in cash. The deal is expected to close in Q1 2025.
• ZEISS acquired the lithography division of Beyond Gravity to expand its semiconductor manufacturing technology group.

Recent fundings:

• Ayar Labs raised $155 million for its in-package optical interconnect for large-scale AI workloads.
• Biomemory raised $18 million to develop its DNA-based storage technology for data centers.
• Azimuth AI raised $11.5 million to develop SoCs for smart city, 2/3-wheeler vehicles, and other edge computing applications.
• Quantum Brilliance received an AUD $13 million (~$8.3 million) investment to build a quantum diamond

New market reports:

• IDC forecasts that the global semiconductor market will grow by 15% in 2025, driven by AI and HPC demand. Meanwhile, Counterpoint Research determined that the global semiconductor industry’s Q3 2024 revenue rose 17% YoY to reach $158.2 billion.
• Yole predicts the semiconductor laser market is expected to surpass $5 billion by 2029 with telecom and infrastructure remaining the most important segment.  The company also forecast the silicon photonics market to surge to $863 million in 2029, with a 45% CAGR.

Products and Partnerships

Advantest launched an integrated known-good-die test cell designed to maximize die-level test yields for wide-bandgap devices used in power semiconductors.

Synaptics extended its Veros IoT connectivity family with a dual-core Bluetooth 5.4 and IEEE 802.15.4 system on chip. The Matter-compliant SoC supports Bluetooth Classic, Bluetooth Low Energy, Zigbee, and Thread protocols concurrently on both cores.

Rambus extended its patent license agreement with Micron Technology for five years. Details of the agreement are confidential, but the deal allows Micron broad access to Rambus’ patent portfolio until late 2029.

Keysight joined the Intel Foundry Accelerator United States Military, Aerospace and Government Alliance. Keysight already provides EDA tools to the defense industry, a role that will be expanded by their membership in the alliance.

Siemens:

• Teamed up with Spirent Communications on a pre-silicon test solution for Ethernet chipset verification, boasting emulating speeds of 1G to 800G.
• Announced its Xcelerator industrial software has been deployed in Navantia’s Coastal Hydrographic Vessel project.

Alpha and Omega Semiconductor released a 4-phase controller for Blackwell GPUs designed to minimize ripple effects, which allows the device to achieve a slew rate of up to 30mV/us.

Marvell revealed a new HBM compute architecture for XPUs. The custom architecture can achieve a 70% reduction in interface power by speeding up I/O interfaces between the internal AI accelerator and HBM base dies.

Broadcom combined 3D silicon stacking and 2.5D packaging technology for its new system-in-package platform that integrates more than 6,000 mm² of silicon and up to 12 HBM stacks in one packaged device. The company deployed it in a new AI accelerator.

Samsung announced its new Android XR platform for headsets and glasses. Created with Qualcomm and Google, it leverages the Gemini AI model to create a conversational user interface and a contextual understanding of the world.

Security

Recent security research:

• SPELL: An End-to-End Tool Flow for LLM-Guided Secure SoC Design for Embedded Systems (University of Florida)
• Robust and Lightweight Challenge Obfuscation Mechanism for Anti-modeling Protection of Arbiter-PUFs ( U. of Maryland,  et al.)
• Secure Cache and Processor Architectures Against Side-Channel, Speculative Execution and Impostor Attacks (Princeton University PhD)
• A Study on FPGA Implementation of Physical Unclonable Functions (UT Dallas)
• Revolutionizing Cybersecurity with Deep Learning: Procedural Detection and Hardware Security in Critical Infrastructure (Howard Univ.) 
• Design-Agnostic Distributed Timing Fault Injection Monitor With End-to-End Design Automation (Rice University)

The U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned China-based cybersecurity company Sichuan Silence and an employee for their roles in the April 2020 compromise of firewalls worldwide.

Two U.S. senators requested an investigation into the Department of Defense’s failure to secure its unclassified telephone communications from foreign espionage followingdd recent Chinese hacks.

The CWE REST API was updated to Version 4.16, offering an easy and way to stay up to date with vulnerabilities.

CISPA and the Technical University of Munich partnered to jointly research issues in cybersecurity and trustworthy AI.

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

Research

Pennsylvania State University will receive $3 million from DARPA as part of a larger grant awarded to Northrop Grumman, aiming to jointly develop a way to integrate gallium nitride (GaN) with silicon substrates.

The Michigan Strategic Fund board approved about $100 million for a supercomputing lab at the University of Michigan and another $28 million for Detroit Diesel to expand its EV parts manufacturing operation, per the Detroit News.

UC Davis joined the $285 million SMART USA Institute, a national initiative to advance research in semiconductor manufacturing.

Quobly demonstrated key building blocks for a quantum computer leveraging commercial FD-SOI.

Infleqtion demonstrated a materials science application powered by logical qubits. The experiment, which involved researchers from the Universities of Chicago and Wisconsin, used the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform to achieve a 6x boost in application-level computational accuracy.

Automotive

Infineon plans to retrospectively implement product compliance for the TRAVEO T2G automotive MCU family with the latest auto cybersecurity standard ISO/SAE 21434.

ROHM and TSMC are working together to develop and produce GaN power devices for EVs.

Hyundai and BAIC plan to inject $1.1 billion into their China JV to help speed up the EV transition.

Stellantis and CATL to invest up to €4.1 billion in a JV to build an all-new lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery plant at Stellantis’ site in Zaragoza, Spain.

Factorial announced its first Solstice all-solid-state battery cells, developed with Mercedes, have been scaled to achieve a 40Ah capacity.

EV batteries subject to the normal use of real-world drivers could last about a third longer than researchers generally predict, according to a SLAC-Stanford Battery Center study.

China accounted for 61% of the global EV traction inverter installation volume in Q3 2024, reports TrendForce.

Education and Training

Synopsys is collaborating with the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka to develop semiconductor talent through the Synopsys Academic & Research Alliance (SARA) program.

Samsung Semiconductor India Research, IIIT-Bangalore, and VLSI System Design launched a Chip Design for High School program.

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

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