Chip Industry Week In Review

The Malaysian government signed a deal with Arm to kickstart a chip design ecosystem. Until now, Malaysia has focused on packaging and test. Adding chip design represents a major change in focus. The country will pay SoftBank $250 million over 10 years for Arm’s chip design IP and train 10,000 engineers.

Global chip sales reached $56 billion in January, up nearly 18% from the same period in 2024, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. Sales increased almost 51% in the Americas. Meanwhile, the silicon wafers market is projected to grow ~7% in 2025, with even stronger gains in 2026, versus a 4%  decline in 2024, per TECHCET.

A consortium of 38 companies, research houses, and universities across Europe are teaming up to reduce the region’s dependence on foreign computing technologies, taking aim at high-performance computing and AI. The project will be divided into two three-year phases, with an initial budget of €240 million, and will leverage RISC-V and other open-source technologies. Technical leads include imec, Axelera AI, Openchip, Codasip, and Jülich Supercomputing Centre.

Despite the Trump administration’s lack of enthusiasm for the bipartisan 2022 CHIPS Act, more than 85% of the Congress-approved direct funding is now in binding contracts, and in many cases construction already has begun. The law continues to have bi-partisan support.

A new CSIS brief points to national security guardrails that are part of the CHIPS Act, allowing a clawback of funding if a recipient does a material expansion of semiconductor manufacturing capacity, joint research, or technology licensing with some foreign entities that is related to critical technology. The report notes there is risk that could further push China’s design-out efforts.

Reacting to TSMC‘s announcement to spend an incremental $100 billion in Arizona, Taiwan’s government denied the move ‘Americanizes’ TSMC or had anything to do with tariffs. The company also said the necessary approvals from the government are pending. TSMC already had planned to invest $65 billion in the U.S. The expansion includes plans for three new fabs, two advanced packaging plants, and an R&D team center.

Allegro Microsystems rejected onsemi’s $35.10 per share cash buyout proposal.

Intel Products launched an Assured Supply Chain program, providing a “chain of custody” of each chip’s journey through the manufacturing process.

Special Report: Automotive OEMs are wrestling with a stack of changes that affect every part of their business and technology, from threats of tariffs and shifting geopolitical alliances, to new vehicle architectures, tighter market windows, and a fundamental reordering of relationships and priorities between OEMs and their suppliers.

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In-Depth
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Security
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Product News
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Research
Events and Further Reading

Global

In Europe:

• Lam Research opened a Netherlands facility to serve as its Europe center for pulsed laser deposition (PLD) technology development.
• The Czech Republic began operating its European Chips Act funded Czech Semiconductor Centre, in Brno.
• The European Semi Industry Association published a position paper on “Water Resilience Strategy,” promoting its vision for advanced water management and recycling technologies in semiconductor manufacturing.

In Asia:

• The Chinese government plans to set up a state-sponsored fund, focusing on AI, quantum, and hydrogen, and expects to attract over $138 billion from local governments and the private sector over the next two decades.
• Toray Industries opened an advanced semiconductor technologies and materials R&D center in Taiwan.
• Tata Electronics, Himax and PSMC formed an alliance to bring “Made in India” display and ultra-low-power AI sensing products.
• SK Telecom inked a deal with Giga Computing and SK Enmove to jointly develop next-generation liquid cooling solutions and AI data center technologies.

Australia-based Alpha HPA is expanding its supply of high-purity alumina for the semiconductor sector for use in AI data centers and power electronics.

In the U.S.

• The Semiconductor Climate Consortium today revealed its four key initiatives for 2025, marking a big step forward in advancing the industry’s commitment to decarbonization and transparency.
• Siemens is spending another $285 million to build new and expanded facilities in Texas and California for electrical products targeted at AI data centers and other industries.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Auto, Security & Pervasive Computing newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:

• Automakers Grapple With Fundamental Tech Changes
• Software-Defined Radar Is First Leap On SDV Path
• Wearable Connectivity, AI Enable New Use Cases

More reporting this week:

• Challenges Grow For Medical ICs
• Verification Experts vs. Generalists
• Tech Talk: Scenario Coverage In Formal Verification

Markets and Money

Financial releases this week: Marvell Technology and  Rigetti Computing.

Microchip announced restructuring actions, including closure of its Tempe, Arizona wafer fab in May and layoffs of ~2,000 employees collectively in Oregon, Colorado, and the Philippines.

Deals and M&A:

• Indie Semiconductor and GlobalFoundries announced a deal to jointly develop a high-performance radar SoC, targeting 77 GHz and 120 GHz radar applications for ADAS. (Read more about software-defined radars for auto.)
• Keysight entered into an agreement with VIAVI Solutions for the previously announced sale of Spirent’s high-speed ethernet and network security business.
• Samsung and KDDI Research inked a deal for joint research in AI wireless technologies.

Fundings:

• QuantWare raised €20 million in a Series A round to help enable the world’s largest quantum processors.
• Atmosic Technologies secured $40 million in Series-D funding.

Reports:

• CSIS’ report, “The AI Power Surge: Growth Scenarios for GenAI Datacenters Through 2030,” addresses the big infrastructure and policy challenges in an “unprecedented scale of electrical power demands.”
• SSD revenue in Q4 declined by 0.5% versus the prior quarter due to weakness in the consumer electronics market, with Samsung retaining the top spot despite a near 10% revenue decline, reports TrendForce. NAND Flash revenue also was impacted in Q4, falling 6% in Q4.

People

Shannon Poulin will succeed soon-to-retire Rick Burns as president of Teradyne’s semiconductor test division in Q2 2025.

Northeastern University professor Ahmed Busnaina has patented a process and printer, claiming to slash chip production costs by 99%.

Workforce and Education

South Korea will introduce an F-2 “top-tier visa” for foreign professionals who have eight years of experience in certain industrial fields, including semiconductors, to work in the country for three years before becoming eligible to apply for permanent residency along with their families, per the Korea Times.

Cornell University received a $10.5 million gift from a philanthropist to fund research using the Empire AI Consortium, a partnership between New York State and research institutions that promote AI innovations for the public good.

The University of Oxford and OpenAI launched a five-year collaboration to advance AI research and education, giving students and faculty staff access to grant funding, enterprise-level security, and cutting-edge AI tools.

The University of Florida invited teachers and students across the state to incorporate semiconductor-focused modules into STEM programs across the state, in a competition to win prizes.

Security

Caspia Technologies said its security linter, called CODAx, discovered 16 security violations in a popular OpenRISC CPU core.

Gartner identified its top cybersecurity trends for 2025, which concern GenAI, machine identities, tactical AI, technology optimization, security behavior and culture programs, and cybersecurity burnout.

TXOne Networks published its annual report on operational technology cybersecurity, highlighting concerns over digital vulnerabilities that can be introduced to industrial control systems such as smart sensors and edge-computing devices.

Recent security research:

• Understanding RowHammer Under Reduced Refresh Latency: Experimental Analysis of Real DRAM Chips and Implications on Future Solutions (ETH Zurich, et al.)
• A RISC-V Multicore and GPU SoC Platform with a Qualifiable SW Stack for Safety Critical Systems (U. Politecnica de Catalunya, et al.)
• HW Trojan Detection in Open-Source Hardware Designs Using Machine Learning (U. de São Paul)
• The national security case for secure AI hardware: A Heilmeier Catechism for FlexHEGs (Georgetown U.)
• AMuLeT: Automated Design-Time Testing of Secure Speculation Countermeasures (U. of Toronto, et al.)
• Towards Reinforcement Learning for Exploration of Speculative Execution Vulnerabilities (UT Austin et al.)

Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers developed a Low-Rank Iterative Diffusion method to shield AI models from adversarial attacks.

CISA issued a number of alerts/advisories.

Product News

Synaptics will unveil new MCUs and wireless SoCs designed for ultra-low-power IoT devices that exhibit contextually-aware AI and ultra-reliable connectivity.

Keysight:

• Collaborated with Samsung and NVIDIA to train AI models for Samsung’s 5G-advanced and 6G technologies, enabling Samsung to deploy AI-optimized RAN software globally.
• Collaborated with Capgemini to integrate and validate 5G new radio non-terrestrial networks in transparent and regenerative modes.
• Announced that the U.S. Army selected its CyPerf network design and verification solution to validate performance, resiliency, and zero trust security for the Unified Network Program.

Infineon:

• Will introduce a virtual prototype of an automotive RISC-V MCU family.
• Added a P-channel device to its family of radiation-tolerant power MOSFETs for Low-Earth-Orbit space applications.
• Released PSOC 4 Multi-Sense, featuring new inductive sensing technology, and non-invasive and non-contact liquid sensing.
• Achieved ISO/SAE 21434 cybersecurity certification for its AURIX TC4x.
• Provided sensor technology to Roborock for its robotic vacuum, featuring a 5-axis robot arm that can move obstacles out of its way and clean in areas that were previously blocked.

Fig. 1: Roborock’s robotic vacuum with 5-axis robot arm enabled by Infineon’s REAL3 Time-of-Flight. Source: Infineon

Research

DARPA-supported startup Elve developed a new process to fabricate traveling-wave tubes (TWT) circuits — used in RF applications — with speed and precision.

An MIT principal investigator found a way to shrink the memory needed to perform calculations to about 15 slots for 100 steps in a computation.

UC San Diego scientists developed a computational approach to model and predict the spiraling patterns of chiral helimagnets.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers used a scanning nitrogen-vacancy center microscope to show how local changes in spin fluctuations are linked together globally near phase transitions, offering insights into wide classes of quantum materials.

Fig. 2: A single-spin qubit probes nanoscale spin fluctuations to reveal magnetic interactions in quantum materials. Source: Andy Sproles/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Florida International University researchers had a breakthrough with lithium-sulfur, a post-lithium-ion technology that could enable EVs to travel farther on a single charge.

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