Chip Industry Week In Review

Worldwide silicon wafer shipments declined nearly 2.7% to 12,266 million square inches in 2024, with wafer revenue contracting 6.5% to $11.5 billion, according to the SEMI Silicon Manufacturers Group.

CSIS released a new report, “Critical Minerals and the Future of the U.S. Economy,” with detailed analysis and policy recommendations for building a secure mineral supply chain for semiconductors and other industries. Among the many semiconductor recommendations, the report recommends rapidly building up expertise for refining gallium and germanium.

Europe is betting big on AI. France’s President Macron announced more than €109 billion in investments for AI infrastructure projects  (detailed list is here, page 24). And the EU Commission President launched InvestAI, an initiative to mobilize €200 billion in AI investment, including a new European fund of €20 billion for AI gigafactories.

imec reported on an OpenWiFi-based networking stack for deterministic wireless communication that is both reliable and fast.

Advantest unveiled an ultra-high-speed DRAM test system engineered for GDDR7, LPDDR6, and DDR6, which are used in AI, HPC, and edge applications.

Synopsys expanded its hardware-assisted verification (HAV) portfolio with new prototyping and emulation systems based on AMD‘s new Versal adaptive SoC, with improved performance, configuration across multiple projects, and scalability beyond 60 billion gates. The new lineup also allows for customized and re-usable cabling, allowing devices to be swapped in and out as needed.

Fig. 1: Synopsys’ new prototyping and emulation machines.

Special Report: Silent data corruption errors in large server farms have become a major concern of cloud users, hyperscalers, processor manufacturers, and the test community.

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Markets and Money
Security
High-Performance Computing
Products and Collaborations
Automotive
Research
Events and Further Reading

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Low Power-High Performance newsletter featuring these articles:

• Signal Integrity Plays Increasingly Critical Role In Chiplet Design
• Normalization Keeps AI Numbers In Check
• What Exactly Is Multi-Physics?

The Test, Measurement & Analytics newsletter also came out this week, featuring:

• Silent Data Errors Still Slipping Through The Cracks
• Simulation Closes Gap Between Chip Design Optimization And Manufacturability
• IC Equipment Communication Standards Struggle As Data Volumes Grow
• Optimizing DFT With AI And BiST
• Tech Talk: Using AI In Semiconductor Inspection

Global

Asia:

• Lam Research will invest more than $1.2 billion in India’s Karnataka state over the coming years in support of five new semiconductor fabs being constructed there.
• Enfabrica opened a new R&D center in Hyderabad, India, for its SuperNIC AI networking solution.
• In Taiwan, TSMC estimates the costs related to the 6.4 magnitude earthquake that struck on January 25 is $161 million.
• China’s largest chipmaker SMIC told Nikkei Asia its clients are requesting early delivery of orders planned for later in the year, and stockpiling inventory in anticipation of U.S. tariffs and potential geopolitical instability.

Europe/Middle East:

• Keysight is participating in two European Union 6G projects that are a part of the 6G Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking.
• Germany’s Jülich Supercomputing Centre purchased a D-Wave annealing quantum computing system, Europe’s first exascale HPC.
• AMD and CEA France are collaborating on component and system architectures for AI computing.
• SambaNova is partnering with stc to launch Saudia Arabia’s first LLM-as-a-service cloud platform.

Markets and Money

Earnings reports this week: Amkor, Applied Materials, ASE, GlobalFoundries, Hua Hong Semi,  Lattice,  Onsemi,  PDF Solutions, SMIC, Softbank, Super Micro, Tower.

NXP plans to acquire Silicon Valley-based Kinara, which makes discrete NPUs, for $307 million

New fundings:

• Groq secured a $1.5 billion commitment from the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia for expanded delivery of its advanced LPU-based AI inference.
• QuEra completed $230 million in financing for development of its large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers.
• AI chip maker EnCharge AI secured $100 million in new funding.
• Photonics company Salience Labs closed $30 million Series A financing.
• QuSecure closed $28 million in funding for its quantum-resistant cybersecurity
• Positron raised over $23 million to scale production of its energy-efficient AI chips.
• Oso Semi closed over $5 million to build out its beamforming chipsets and systems.

Analyst Reports:

• Yole Group expects strong growth in the semiconductor market, with servers and automotive applications exceeding 10% growth rates. The computing sector is projected to reach $150 billion by 2030.
• TrendForce reported that global AI server shipments grew by 46% in 2024, but several factors could impact AI server shipments in 2025. These include U.S. chip restrictions, the DeepSeek effect, and supply chain readiness for GB200/GB300 racks.
• IDC expects AI spending to grow 1.7X faster than overall digital tech investments with an economic impact of more than $1.6 trillion by 2027 in Asia/Pacific, excluding Japan.

High-Performance Computing

Google Cloud shared an approach to solving the problem of large power spikes associated with AI workloads, and it issued a call to action for industry collaboration.

In quantum:

• Quantinuum announced the Reimei quantum computer is now operational at Japan’s RIKEN research institution and will work together with Riken’s supercomputer Fugaku to create a quantum-HPC hybrid platform.
• The Barcelona Supercomputing Center presented the first quantum computer developed with 100% European technology.
• Oxford University researchers demonstrated the first instance of distributed quantum computing.

Texas A&M University is tripling its supercomputing capacity with a $45 million investment in NVIDIA AI infrastructure technology.

Products and Collaborations

Nordson released a new ultrasonic cleaning station designed to keep nozzles and needles clean, preventing clogging during IC production and ensuring consistent conformal coating operations and improved yields.

Fig. 2: Nordson ultrasonic cleaning station. 

Siemens EDA inked two deals:

• An exclusive OEM agreement for its EDA business to bring Alphawave Semi’s portfolio of high-speed interconnect silicon IP to market through its sales channel.
• A collaboration with Compute Maritime (CML), connecting its simulation and CFD software with CML’s ship design platform.

Open-silicon organization lowRISC announced the addition of formal verification techniques to ensure quality of the CHERIoT-Ibex core.

Infineon released its first products to customers based on advanced 200mm SiC wafer manufacturing technology, made in Villach, Austria, aimed at high-voltage applications such as renewable energies, trains, and EVs. The company also announced discrete CoolSiC MOSFETs 650 V in new Q-DPAK and TOLL packages, targeting AI servers, renewables, and EV chargers.

Ansys and Concepts NREC partnered to deliver an automated workflow that connects design tools with robust analysis tools for turbomachinery applications.

UMC achieved the highest ‘A’ ratings in both CDP’s Climate Change and Water Security categories in 2024, marking its third consecutive year of double ‘A’ recognition.

Security

Recent security research:

• Securing DRAM at Scale: ARFM-Driven Row Hammer Defense with Unveiling the Threat of Short tRC Patterns (KAIST, SK hynix)
• A New Dynamic Countermeasure to Strengthen Design Obfuscation in FPGAs (University of New Hampshire)
• Secure Machine Learning Hardware: Challenges and Progress (MIT)
• Security Helper Chiplets: A New Paradigm for Secure Hardware Monitoring (UCLA, Intel Labs)
• Ovonic Threshold Switching for Ultralow Energy Physical Reservoir Computing (imec)

CISA and the FBI released a Secure by Design alert titled, “Eliminating Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities.” CISA issued a number of other alerts/advisories, as well.

Automotive

Honda, Nissan and Mitsubishi ended merger talks, but will continue collaboration on EV and intelligent vehicles.

Chinese electric car maker BYD will release a “DiPilot” assisted driving system incorporating DeepSeek technology for its cars, including a 69,800 yuan ($9,555) low-cost vehicle, reports CNBC.

LightSolver partnered with Ansys to accelerate CAE modeling for automotive and other industries. In test cases, LightSolver optimized sparse matrix reordering within the Ansys LS-DYNA solver, reducing the amount of computation required and enabling faster run times.

Stellantis and Mistral AI announced their latest initiative — a next-gen AI in-car assistant that enables natural conversation and serves as a voice-enabled user manual.

Jaguar Land Rover is investing $180 million in its USA technology hub in Portland, Oregon, aimed at next-gen connectivity and autonomous driving technologies in its future vehicles.

Argonne National Laboratory researchers examined how adding certain dopants to a solid electrolyte could improve its interaction with a lithium metal electrode, resulting in safer, more energy-efficient batteries.

Research

Argonne National Laboratory physicists adapted superconducting nanowire photon detectors to be sensitive and precise high-energy particle detectors.

DARPA launched a Robust Quantum Sensors program.

MIT researchers demonstrated superfluid stiffness of magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene.

UC San Diego launched the MLSys Initiative to advance next-gen machine learning systems and develop innovative algorithms.

UC Berkeley engineers developed a wearable device to enhance grasping functionality in people with spinal cord injuries.

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

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