Chip Industry Week In Review

McKinsey issued a new report on the state of the chemical supply chain for semiconductors in the U.S., citing potential shortages of high-purity materials such as tungsten, aluminum and copper, lack of access to CMP slurries and photoresists for EUV, and rising competition for high-k precursors that can fetch higher prices outside of the U.S.

CSIS weighed in on the U.S. goverment’s recent demand to increase mineral production for national security reasons. The think tank also determined that U.S.-Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) cooperation is vital to counter China’s dominance, given its vast supplies of copper deposits and cobalt.

SEMI forecasts global fab equipment spending for front-end facilities will rise 2% to $110 billion in 2025, surging 18% to $130 billion in 2026. Key drivers include AI integration, HPC demand, and a ramp in advanced nodes like 2nm and backside power delivery. While China remains the top spender, Korea and Taiwan are increasing investments to support AI-related growth, with more than 50 new fabs expected to come online by 2026.

The U.S. Department of Commerce is further restricting China’s ability to acquire AI, HPC, exascale, and quantum computing technologies with the addition of 80 entities put on its export blacklist, meaning American companies are prohibited from supplying these entities without government permission. The additions include Huawei and HiSilicon.

Siemens completed its acquisition of Altair, a provider of industrial simulation and analysis software. The $10 billion deal will give Siemens’ Xcelerator platform new capabilities in mechanical and electromagnetic simulation, HPC, data science, and AI.

imec researchers proposed a new DRAM bit cell without a capacitor that uses two thin-film indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (IGZO) transistors for high-density 3D DRAM and embedded DRAM.

Alphawave Semi unveiled a portfolio of optoelectronics products that address the high-speed interconnect market consisting of PAM4 and Coherent-lite DSPs for active electrical cables, optical retimers, and gearbox transceivers.

Quest Global will use Rapidus‘ 2nm gate-all-around (GAA) manufacturing process for its low power AI chips.

Special Reports:

• First-time silicon success is falling sharply due to rising complexity, the need for more iterations in the shift from monolithic chips to multi-die assemblies, and an increasing amount of customization.
• Interposers and substrates are undergoing a profound transformation from intermediaries to engineered platforms responsible for power distribution, thermal management, high-density interconnects, and signal integrity.

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Markets and Money
Education and Training
People
Security
Product News
Research
Quantum
Events and Further Reading

Global

Europe:

• Vishay Intertechnology will invest £250 million to expand compound semiconductor manufacturing at its Newport facility, the UK’s largest semiconductor site, backed by the government’s Automotive Transformation Fund.
• The EU launched the aCCCess project to unify and strengthen Europe’s 27 Chips Competence Centres through a four-year initiative aimed at building the European Network of Chips Competence Centers. Acting as a coordination hub for CCCs, Chips Pilot Lines, and the virtual Design Platform, aCCCess will promote innovation, streamline access to semiconductor infrastructure and funding, and support SMEs and startups across the continent.

U.S.:

• The Peterson Institute for International Economics argued for continuing the U.S. CHIPS Act.
• This year’s SEMI Startups for Sustainable Semiconductors Program is now accepting applications.
• ExxonMobil will begin producing 99.999% ultra-pure isopropyl alcohol (IPA) by 2027 at its Baton Rouge facility to meet growing U.S. semiconductor manufacturing needs.
• FTD solutions partnered with CEA-Leti to evaluate and enhance semiconductor manufacturing water management strategies to meet sustainability goals.

Asia:

• Infineon opened a new advanced chip design facility in India. The Global Capability Centre in Ahmedabad, in the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, is focused on R&D, product software, and IT and systems and application engineering.
• Japan-based Zuken signed a joint development agreement with IBM for heterogeneous chip integration packaging technology, focusing on 3DIC packaging design.
• Hamamatsu Photonics completed its new optical semiconductor facility in Japan.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Systems and Design newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:

• Challenges In Managing Chiplet Resources
• Digital Twins For Design And Verification Workflows
• The Evolving Role Of AI In Verification

More reporting this week:

• Big Changes Ahead For Interposers And Substrates

Markets and Money

Funding:

• MemryX raised $44 million in Series B funding for its vision-based AI inference accelerator that uses compute-at-memory technology and a dataflow architecture.
• CamGraPhIC raised €25 million in Series A for its graphene-based transceivers for AI GPU to HBM interconnects.
• Iceberg Quantum emerged from stealth with AUD $2 million (~$1.3M) in pre-seed funding to develop fault-tolerant quantum computing architectures based on low-density parity-check codes.

Deals:

• Sivers Semiconductors partnered with WIN Semiconductors to scale production of its high-power DFB lasers and laser arrays for CWDM and DWDM applications.

Market reports:

• TrendForce anticipates that NAND flash prices will stabilize in Q2 2025, with 3D NAND wafer prices expected to rise 10% to 15% QoQ and client SSD prices to increase by 3% to 8%. Meanwhile, conventional DRAM prices are expected to decline up to 5% QoQ, while average DRAM pricing including HBM is forecast to rise by 3% to 8%.
• Yole Group reports that while SiC market growth has paused due to a short-term slowdown in battery electric vehicle (BEV) shipments, the sector remains on track to surpass $10 billion by 2029, with a rebound expected in 2026. Tesla continues to lead in SiC adoption, though Chinese OEMs are gaining ground.

Education and Training

Cadence will establish a design center in Wales in a joint venture with Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult and the Welsh government. The design center will work with universities, start-ups, and small businesses on new semiconductor projects and aims to bolster the Welsh semiconductor workforce.

The University of Illinois Chicago launched a Semiconductor and Microsystems Manufacturing Club to bring together students interested in designing and fabricating chips and other microelectronic systems.

The University of Oregon hopes to double its capacity to train the semiconductor workforce with $2 million in funding for its masters programs.

People

Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger  joined venture capital firm Playground Global as a general partner, as well as taking executive chair and head of technology roles at Gloo.

Wolfspeed appointed Robert Feurle as CEO, effective May 1, 2025, succeeding interim Executive Chairman Thomas Werner.

proteanTecs appointed Veijo Kontas, former SoC CTO at Nokia Mobile Networks, to its Advisory Board to provide strategic guidance on telecommunications and system-on-chip (SoC) development.

Security

Hakimo announced a $10.5 million funding round and launched AI Operator, an autonomous security agent that combines computer vision and GenAI to monitor security hardware such as cameras and badge readers. It detects anomalies then issues real-time speaker warnings and executes responses, with humans intervening only when necessary.

Recent security research:

• MIT-CSAIL engineers developed a formal verification scheme for secure speculation on out-of-order processors working at the register-transfer level (RTL), capturing key details about vulnerabilities to side-channel attacks.
• SPLIT PUF: Efficient PUF Implementation Using Underutilized FPGA Resources (MIT, of Florida)
• Input-Triggered Hardware Trojan Attack on Spiking Neural Networks (Sorbonne U.)
• On Power-Off Temperature Attacks Potential Against Security Sensors ( Grenoble Alpes)

The UK National Cyber Security Centre outlined a three-phase timeline for organizations to transition to quantum-resistant encryption methods by 2035.

Microsoft released new Security Co-pilot AI agents aimed at phishing triage, conditional access, vulnerability remediation, threat intelligence, and more.

interface reviewed ENISA’s (European Union Agency for Cybersecurity) role in an evolving policy ecosystem.

CISA issued a number of alerts/advisories.

Product News

Bruker launched eWARP, a next-generation EBSD detector that combines custom direct electron detection with CMOS technology for materials characterization that enables up to 14,400 patterns per second — and up to 350,000 in binning mode.

Sarcina Technology launched a customizable AI packaging platform leveraging ASE’s FOCoS-CL technology and UCIe-A interconnects to offer a chiplet-based solutions for generative and edge AI applications.

Rambus discussed a new inference technique called chain-of-thought and the innovations needed to support its computational demands.

Keysight introduced a 1.6 Terabit Ethernet test platform to validate AI infrastructure, network components, and data center interconnects from 200GE to 1600GE. Keysight also announced new single and dual optical channel sampling oscilloscopes for 1.6T optical transceiver testing.

Four Ansys photonic solvers for 3D nano-photonic simulation, waveguide design, and physics-based transport were certified for the GlobalFoundries Fotonix platform.

Metanoia licensed Cadence’s Tensilica ConnX 230 DSP for a new software-defined radio platform, leveraging the DSP alongside its own CPU to implement 5G low-PHY-baseband algorithms.

Si2‘s Compact Model Coalition made its Verilog-A model coding guidelines available to the public.

Toray Engineering unveiled a high-precision thermal compression bonder for panel-level packaging (PLP), targeting growing demand from AI server and chiplet applications. The company says the system supports large panels up to 600mm², achieving ±0.8μm alignment accuracy even on warping-prone glass substrates.

Research

Kyoto University researchers developed world-first 3D van der Waals open frameworks (WaaFs), paving the way for scalable and recyclable materials.

Argonne National Laboratory nuclear scientists developed a technology for more efficient uranium and rare earth element recovery.

ORNL researchers developed a supercomputing memory management tool that improves data storage efficiency, enabling multiple programs with different storage needs to function within a single supercomputing rack over CXL.

ETH Zurich and UT Austin classified the mechanisms of resistive switching in monolayer and bulk 2D layered materials.

Harvard University applied physicists invented an interferometer that allows precise control of light’s frequency, intensity, and mode in a compact package, possibly replacing beam-splitting waveguides for fiber optics.

Med tech:

• VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland launched a pilot line environment to facilitate faster market entry for medical innovations, including electronics, photonics, microelectronics, and microfluidics.
• imec, Ghent University, Medtronic, and partners developed a prototype of a mobile diagnostic device, based on silicon photonics, to characterize different stages of cardiovascular diseases.
• KIST researchers ​ developed a technology that uses AI to precisely predict the cognitive efficiency of artificial vision devices.

Quantum

Quantum industry revenue topped $1.45 billion in 2024, according to the Quantum Economic Development Consortium. It also found that 37% of quantum companies focus on hardware components, with 15% in software and 15% in communications and security.

MIT researchers developed a scalable quantum interconnect that enables direct, all-to-all communication among multiple superconducting quantum processors by efficiently shuttling microwave photons between them.

Researchers from JPMorganChase, Quantinuum, Argonne National Laboratory, ORNL, and UT Austin experimentally demonstrated certified randomness using a 56-qubit quantum computer. This may be the first practical application of this technology.

Researchers from Delft University of Technology, Fujitsu, and Element Six demonstrated a complete set of quantum gates with error probabilities below 0.1% using diamond spin qubits.

University of Oxford researchers demonstrated a fundamental speedup of the controlled-Z gate in superconducting qubits, reaching a fidelity of 99.8% in 25 ns.

Xanadu and Corning plan to build customized fiber interconnects to enable low-loss networking of photonic quantum computing chips.

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

Semiconductor Engineering’s latest newsletters:

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