Chip Industry Week In Review

Global semiconductor sales hit $57.8 billion in November 2024, an increase of 20.7% compared to the same month last year, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.

In U.S. government news:

• The U.S. Department of Commerce finalized up to $325 million in CHIPS Act funding for Hemlock Semiconductor, which will support construction of a new semiconductor-grade polysilicon manufacturing facility.
• The U.S Department of Commerce and Natcast located the third flagship CHIPS for America R&D facility in Arizona. The Advanced Packaging Piloting Facility aims to bridge the gap between laboratory research and full-scale semiconductor production with 300mm CMOS wafer prototyping capability and an advanced packaging pilot line.
• The U.S. Department of Defense’s updated its list of Chinese military companies operating in the U.S., which includes a number of tech companies. New additions include ChangXin Memory Technologies, Tencent, and battery technology company CATL.  SMIC and Yangtze Memory Technologies are still on the list, as well.

Special Report: What’s Next For Through-Silicon Vias: Fab tools are being fine-tuned for TSV processes as demand ramps for everything from HBM to integrated RF, power, and MEMS in 3D packaging.

Imec demonstrated electrically-driven GaAs-based multi-quantum-well nano-ridge laser diodes, which were monolithically fabricated on 300mm silicon wafers on its CMOS pilot prototyping line. The move showed the potential of direct epitaxial growth of high-quality III-V materials on silicon.

CES highlights:

• NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang kicked off CES, introducing new GPUs for gaming and laptops, a new platform for developing physical AI systems, such as robots and AVs, and a personal AI supercomputer with 1 petaflop of AI performance at FP4 precision.
• Jensen’s comments on very useful quantum computers taking another 15 to 30 years drew a sharp rebuke from D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz, who described Huang’s comments as “dead wrong.” D-Wave’s machines are in production today using an annealing approach.
• Siemens announcements included bringing new industrial AI capabilities to the shop floor, a new Designcenter software suite, a partnership with JetZero for sustainable air travel, a new startup enablement program for industrial metaverse technologies, and a deal with NVIDIA to bring photorealism to PLM.
• Intel unveiled new Core Ultra processors, designed for desktops, mobile, gaming and edge applications.
• AMD’s processors will now power Dell‘s Pro devices. AMD also announced new gaming and PC processors.
• Synaptics demonstrated its Astra IoT platform, a scalable embedded and open-source software solution optimized for multimodal Edge AI workloads.
• Micron announced additions to its memory and storage.
• Find automotive-related CES announcements here.

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Markets and Money
Products and Standards
Automotive
Security and Safety
Research
Events

Global

SEMI expects 18 new fab construction projects to begin in 2025. Most of the 3 new 200mm and 15 new 300mm facilities are expected to start operations in 2026 or 2027.

A new survey from Capgemini found concern among executives about the semiconductor supply chain, with half of downstream companies surveyed worried that chip suppliers may not be able to meet their needs. The report also highlights a mismatch in the increase in chip demand expected by the semiconductor industry versus that expected by downstream companies.

Micron broke ground on a new high-bandwidth memory (HBM) advanced packaging facility in Singapore. Operations are scheduled to begin in 2026.

The U.S. Department of Commerce published its top export enforcements in 2024, including numerous cases charging sanctions and export control violations and smuggling of advanced technologies to China, Russia, and Iran.

Rapidus inked deals with PFN and Sakura for greener data center/AI infrastructure in Japan.

Markets and Money

In the latest startup funding report, five mega-rounds of over $100 million and AI chips and interconnects end the year on a high note, totaling $3 billion for 75 companies.

Ansys will sell its PowerArtist business to Keysight, pending regulatory approval and the finalization of Ansys’ sale to Synopsys. PowerArtist is an RTL platform used for early stage power analysis, which enables power budget decisions to be made earlier design stages.

Advantest inked partnership agreements and made small minority investments into probe card manufacturers Technoprobe and FormFactor.

Cohu completed its acquisition of Tignis, a provider of AI semiconductor process control and analytics-based monitoring software.

Park Systems acquired Lyncée Tec, a provider of Digital Holographic Microscope technology, to boost its optical metrology business.

Caddis Cloud Solutions partnered with Mission Critical Group to develop new data center power solutions. The two firms said the partnership is aimed at simplifying data center development, while reducing waste and optimizing supply chain management.

Automotive

The shift to software-defined vehicles is changing nearly every aspect of automotive design, from what hardware is added into vehicles, when it gets added, and what gets left behind.

Keysight launched the Novus mini automotive network test platform for software-defined vehicles. The platform, an extension of the Novus line, offers multi-GB BASE-T1 support at multiple speeds, and allows for both traffic generation and protocol testing on a single platform.

Deals:

• NXP plans to buy Austrian-based SDV solution, provider TTTech Auto for $625 million.
• Arm is partnering with Aston Martin Aramco Formula One as the official AI compute partner.
• Siemens EDA is partnering with Cognizant on a solution accelerator for software-defined vehicles.
• NVIDIA announced new partnerships with Toyota and other carmakers for autonomous vehicle fleets.
• Amazon is teaming up with Qualcomm to leverage more efficient LLMS and NPUs for automotive applications.

The NHTSA opened an investigation into the Smart Summon features on certain Tesla vehicles that may have resulted in four crashes.

More CES automotive announcements:

• TI introduced new edge AI-enabled mmWave radar sensors and Arm-based MCU paired with TI’s DSP for audio.
• Infineon and Flex showcased a zone controller design platform with an MCU architecture for software-defined vehicles.
• Sweden-based Smart Eye showcased its driver monitoring system (DMS) and announced a license agreement with Fingerprint Cards for iris recognition.
• VinAI featured its drunk driving detection system and DMS, parking assist and 360° surround view.
• Optical semiconductor company Lumotive is partnering with Sony for advanced 3D sensing.
• Honda presented new EVs with Level 3 automated driving, to be in production in 2026 at the Ohio Honda EV hub.

Security and Safety

Edge And IoT security is starting to turn a corner, with more attention, openness, and cross-market application of tools and techniques starting to have an impact.

This week, the U.S. finalized and launched the Cyber Trust Mark, a voluntary cybersecurity labeling program for wireless interconnected smart products, after completing 18 months of public notice and input.

The ISO 26262 standard, which has become a mainstay since the trend toward vehicle electrification really took root a decade ago, is starting to gain traction in markets outside of automotive chip and system design.

In research:

• German researchers discovered “Tracking UWB Devices Through Radio Frequency Fingerprinting Is Possible.”
• NC State and U. of Maryland published “Surface-Based Authentication System for Integrated Circuit Chips.”
• CISPA investigated privacy leakage through selected Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) features.

Trend Micro and Intel are collaborating to protect enterprise customers from cyber threats, featuring CPU-based threat detection.

CISA added new vulnerabilities and advisories here.

Products and Standards

JEDEC published updates to the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) standard and associated host controller interface standard. UFS 4.1 offers faster data access and improved performance over 4.0 while maintaining hardware compatibility.

Research

Stanford researchers used ultra-thin material niobium phosphide to conduct electricity better than copper in sub-5nm film thicknesses.

Researchers from Princeton and IIT cut the time and cost of designing wireless chips with AI, in new research titled, “Deep-learning enabled generalized inverse design of multi-port radio-frequency and sub-terahertz passives and integrated circuits.”

The U.S. Department of Energy awarded eight prizes to teams developing silicon carbide (SiC) packaging prototypes with a focus on high-voltage environments.

NASA will use Montana State University‘s radiation-tolerant technology called RadPC, which is “three times as stable as the current state-of-the-art satellite computers due to its ability to withstand potentially crippling radiation emitted by the sun and other celestial bodies.”

Imec and partners demonstrated long-term outdoor stability of perovskite solar modules.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering’s Auto, Security and Pervasive Computing newsletter was published this week, featuring these top stories:

• Edge And IoT Security Turning A Corner
• How Software-Defined Vehicles Change Auto Chip Design
• ISO 26262’s Importance Widens Beyond Automotive

Plus, these additional stories this week:

• Special Report: What’s Next For Through-Silicon Vias
• Startup Funding: Q4 2024

Find all the latest SE newsletters here.

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

Events 

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including: