Chip Industry Week In Review

The EU Commission approved €920 million in German State aid to support Infineon in setting up its Smart Power Fab in Dresden. Total funding for the Dresden site amounts to about €1 billion.

PDF Solutions will acquire secureWISE for $130 million to expand the reach of its semiconductor manufacturing data platform, providing secure, remote access monitoring and control.

Tariffs, trade, and CHIPS Act:

• The Trump administration said it will likely impose 25% tariffs or more on cars, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors.
• The EU Commission published a Q&A on the U.S. reciprocal tariff policy, and a Swedish official emphasized EU’s response must be WTO-compliant.
• The president of the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) said, “Tariffs are the wrong negotiating tool. The risk of a global trade conflict with negative effects on the world economy is high.”
• The Trump administration reportedly plans to dismiss about 500 probationary employees from NIST, which oversees the CHIPS Act, reports Bloomberg Law.

Financial releases this week: Arteris, Analog Devices, Cadence, BE Semi, indie Semi.

Special Report: The need for cutting-edge semiconductors is accelerating in applications ranging from hyperscale data centers powering large language models to edge AI in smartphones, IoT devices, and autonomous systems. But manufacturing those chips relies heavily on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which has become one of the biggest barriers to scaling production.

Lam Research unveiled two new manufacturing tools — ALTUS Halo, a molybdenum ALD (atomic layer deposition) tool, overcoming the limitations of conventional metals to enable chip scaling for advanced applications, and Akara, an advanced etch tool with plasma processing technologies that enable the precision and performance needed for 3D chipmaking.

Fig. 1: Lam’s new molybdenum ALD tool. Source: Lam Research

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Markets and Money
Security
Product News
Vehicles and Batteries
People and Workforce
Research
Events and Further Reading

Global

Asia:

• ASE launched its fifth plant in Penang, Malaysia, expanding floor space from 1 million square feet to about 3.4 million square feet, which will be used for advanced packaging technologies for next-gen applications.
• China-based Spirox is building a lab for automotive-grade verification of power semiconductor chips in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Europe

• Stantec will provide design services for Silicon Box’s €3.2 billion semiconductor assembly and test facility in Italy.
• Microsoft will spend an additional $700 million to expand computing capacity in Poland.

Americas

U.S. think tank CSIS published:

• The AI Diffusion Framework: Securing U.S. AI Leadership While Preempting Strategic Drift
• Mining for Defense: Unlocking the Potential for U.S.-Canada Collaboration on Critical Minerals
• Albany NanoTech’s Potential to Support the National Semiconductor Technology Center
• The Transatlantic Alliance in the Age of Trump: The Coming Collisions.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:

• Interconnects Approach Tipping Point
• Memory Wall Problem Grows With LLMs
• EUV’s Future Looks Even Brighter
• What’s Next In Advanced Packaging?

More reporting this week:

• ADAS Adds Complexity To Automotive Sensor Fusion

Markets and Money

Rumors continue to swirl about the breakup and acquisition of Intel‘s main business units. The WSJ reported that Broadcom is looking to buy Intel’s chip design business, while and TSMC is looking to buy Intel Foundry. Meanwhile, Silver Lake reportedly is in discussions to buy a majority stake in Altera, Intel’s FPGA business, CNBC reported.

Business reports:

• SEMI published its Q4 2024 Semiconductor Manufacturing Monitor Report, showing strong results and solid YoY growth across most key segments of the global semiconductor manufacturing industry.
• An oversupply of NAND Flash in the first quarter of 2025 led to price declines and financial pressure on suppliers, according to TrendForce. However, production cuts and inventory reductions in the smartphone sector are likely to lead to a positive bounce for the rest of the year.

Government fundings:

• The EU and Finnish governments awarded €29 million for the APECS pilot line, focused on VTT‘s shared-use cleanroom facilities and the development of semiconductor manufacturing processes.
• A Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund granted about $23 million to Silicon Laboratories for a new R&D lab in Austin.

Startup fundings:

• Cambridge GaN Devices closed a $32 million Series C funding.
• Lumotive raised $45 million to expand its programmable optical semiconductors.
• Wooptix secured over €10 Million in Series C funding for its semiconductor metrology leveraging wavefront phase imaging technology.
• Dream, an AI company aimed at national cybersecurity, raised $100 million Series B funding at a $1.1 billion valuation.
• AheadComputing landed $21.5 million in seed funding to develop its microprocessor architecture for AI, cloud, and edge devices. The company is dedicated to working on 64-bit RISC-V application processors.

Accenture invested in Voltron Data, who claims its tool can “process petabyte-scale data faster and at a lower cost than traditional CPU-based systems.”

People and Workforce

Synopsys and the SEMI Foundation signed an MoU aimed at advancing workforce development within semiconductor chip design.

Brewer Science’s Dr. Douglas Guerrero was honored as an SPIE Fellow.

Security

Recent security research:

• Secure VLSI Architecturs: Defense Against Hardware Trojans and Side-Channel Attacks (NVIDIA)
• Secure computing systems using emerging technologies (NTU)
• HW Trojan Design With Low Overhead and High Destructiveness for STT-MRAM-Based CIMs (Chung Yuan Christian Univ., et al)
• Non-Linear Cyclic Variable Clock Feistel Bridge-Inspired Countermeasure for Securing RISC-V Crypto-Core Against Power Attacks (IIT) 
• Anti-Counterfeiting Secured Design of a Bandgap Reference Circuit (Sorbonne Univ.)
• Live Demonstration: Securing Wireless ICs Against Supply Chain Attacks Using SyncLock (Sorbonne Univ.)

CISA, DARPA, and the NSA called for software-controlled systems that can be assessed to verify functionality, safety, and security across all conditions. CISA, the FBI, and partners released an advisory on Ghost (Cring) ransomware. CISA also published an update on the Vulnrichment initiative to supercharge CVE Data and issued a number of alerts/advisories.

Product News

Arteris released FlexGen smart NoC interconnect IP, which can help designers achieve a 30% reduction in wire length and 10% reduction in latency. Featuring AI-driven automation, FlexGen is capable of generating NoC topologies in a matter of hours.

Advantest unveiled SiConic, a scalable solution for automated silicon validation, designed to address the increasing complexity of advanced SoCs.

Siemens EDA delivered certified and automated design flows for TSMC‘s 3DFabric InFO packaging technology using its advanced packaging integration solutions.

Fig. 2: Siemens and TSMC 3D design flows. Source: Siemens.

Infineon released high-performance gallium nitride CoolGaN G3 Transistor 100 V in new packages in a familiar silicon footprint to drive industry standardization, offering a low-resistance connection and low parasitics.

Arm made its extension for GitHub Copilot widely available, allowing users to more easily migrate to the Arm architecture. Though currently only available for servers and cloud applications, the company has plans to expand to mobile, IoT, and SDV use cases.

Kioxia and Sandisk announced a 3D flash memory technology with a 4.8Gb/s NAND interface speed.

Microsoft uncorked the Majorana 1, a quantum chip powered by Topological Core architecture, capable of controlling Majorana particles to more reliably produce qubits. The company said the architecture used in its development could one day lead to chips containing a million qubits.

Applied Materials introduced a new defect review system.

Vehicles and Batteries

Sensor fusion is becoming increasingly popular and more complex in automotive designs, integrating multiple types of sensors into a single chip or package and intelligently routing data to wherever it is needed. And ADAS adds complexity.

Infineon reported on project GENIAL!, which aims to optimize collaboration between automotive OEMs and their component and technology suppliers while accelerating innovation across the automotive value chain.

Saronic raised $600 million in funding for autonomous ships.

Stellantis unveiled its first in-house-developed automated driving system, with hands-free and eyes-off (SAE Level 3) functionality.

BYD plans to deploy solid-state batteries in EVs in a pilot phase starting in 2027, reported Electrek.

Volojet launched a three-wheeled EV that combines the features of a sports car and a motorcycle, reported KSBW.

EV truck maker Nikola filed voluntary petitions under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code.

Research

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists are exploring a more energy-efficient approach to optical sensors.

UC San Diego and CEA-Leti unveiled a micro-actuator driving system that combines innovative solid-state battery technology with novel IC designs for 2-in-1 storage and voltage boost conversion techniques.

Quantum:

• CEA-Leti and Quobly developed a solution using FD-SOI CMOS technology that provides simultaneous microsecond readouts of tens of quantum devices, providing a path to low power and scalable quantum ICs.
• Penn State and Columbia University developed a novel approach to maintain special quantum characteristics, even in 3D materials.
• Argonne National Laboratory researchers used surface-sensitive spintronic terahertz spectroscopy (SSTS) to get an unprecedented look at how quantum materials behave at interfaces. And used an AI material laboratory to produce high-conductivity, low-defect electronic electronic polymer thin films.
• ORNL demonstrated a device that combines key quantum photonic capabilities on a single chip for the first time.

Find more research here.

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

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