Chip Industry Week In Review

Check out our new Inside Chips podcast.

President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs were announced on Thursday. The executive order stated that semiconductors and copper imports are not directly subject to the reciprocal tariff, although the exemption may be short-lived. Semiconductor equipment and tools were not mentioned, leaving the industry searching for clarification. Regardless, higher tariffs for automotive and consumer electronics, supply chain disruptions, and Europe/Asia’s own package of expected retaliatory tariffs ultimately will impact the overall chip industry. [See chip industry stock impacts here.]

The Trump administration set up a new entity to take over administration of the CHIPS Act program. “The United States Investment Accelerator” resides within the Department of Commerce and aims to streamline and facilitate investments over $1 billion.

The Semiconductor Industry Association announced global semiconductor sales were $54.9 billion in February 2025, up 17.1% compared to the February 2024 total of $46.9 billion, and 2.9% less than the January 2025 total of $56.5 billion. Year-to-year sales were up 48.4% in the Americas, 10.8% in Asia Pacific/Other, 5.6% in China, and 5.1% in Japan, but down 8.1% in Europe. Month-to-month sales decreased slightly across the board.

DARPA published a list of 15 companies “targeting industrially useful quantum computers” as part of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative. Synopsys, meanwhile, announced that it will participate in the initiative alongside Hewlett Packard Labs, marking its “official foray” into quantum computing R&D.

Europe is betting big on chiplets:

• Imec and the State Government of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, launched the Advanced Chip Design Accelerator to support the shift toward chiplet architectures in automotive, focused on state-of-the-art chiplets, packaging, system integration, sensing, and AI as part of imec’s Automotive Chiplet Program.
• Research Fab Microelectronics Germany launched a Fraunhofer-led Chiplet Application Hub that will serve as a central platform for the development and application of chiplet technologies.

Fig.1: Electronics solutions based on chiplets are the first to allow the integration of various functional units in different technologies on a substrate or into a 3D chip structure. Source: Fraunhofer IIS/EAS.

Intel’s customer- and partner-focused event was held this week. Key takeaways:

• The company would divest non-core businesses (no specifics yet);
• The Intel 18A process technology is on track, entered risk production, and is approaching first external tape-outs, with high-volume production expected later this year for its Panther Lake processor;
• Intel pitched a more customer-centric, engineer focused approach, and
• It will offer customized x86 chips.

A slew of optical networking and communication and related announcements were made in conjunction with the OFC 2025 conference in San Francisco this week. Among them:

• ASE demonstrated a CPO device that mounts multiple optical engines directly onto a substrate, enabling <5 pJ/bit power consumption and major bandwidth increases.
• Teradyne rolled out its new production system for first high-volume, double-sided wafer probe test cell for silicon photonics.
• Keysight, NTT Innovative Devices, and Lumentum demonstrated 448 Gbps data transmission using 224 GBaud PAM4 optical technology.
• Lightmatter debuted a 3D photonic interposer, as well as a 3D co-packaged optics product.
• Alphawave demonstrated its 224G PAM4 electrical SerDes, 6T I/O chiplets, a UCIe D2D IP subsystem, and an optical PCIe subsystem.
• Imec built and tested a photonic code-division multiplexing FMCW 144GHz distributed radar.

MLCommons released its latest inference benchmark results.

In Semiconductor Engineering’s latest startup funding report, 75 startups raised $2 billion, with big funding in AI chips, quantum and data center communications.

Special Report: Concerns about chip and system security are beginning to bear fruit in some markets, driven by the overlap in safety and security in automotive applications and the growing value of algorithms and complex systems in others.

Quick links to more news:

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

Global

Asia:

• UMC held a grand opening for its new 22nm fab in Singapore, with volume production targeted for 2026.
• Hitachi High-Tech recently started operations for its new etch system facility in Kudamatsu City, Japan.
• Japan’s Rapidus received budget approval from the Japanese government for its 2nm technologies, allowing for the pilot line to start in April to develop prototype 2nm GAA transistors on 300mm wafers. Mass production is expected to begin in 2027.
• FormFactor is expanding its Taiwan probe card technology center.

EU:

• Arteris opened a new engineering hub in Poland, supporting the development of silicon-proven network-on-chip IP and SoC integration automation software for the semiconductor industry
• France-based CEA-Leti published its “2025 Scientific Report,” an in-depth (116 pages) overview of its research focus, including neuromorphic computing, in-memory computing, edge, chiplet interconnects, and more.
• The EU put €15 million behind the PhotonHub Phactory project, supporting photonic technologies.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Automotive, Security & Pervasive Computing newsletter this week, featuring these articles:

• Auto Sector Leads The Way In IC Security
• Stakes Are High For Aerospace, Defense IC Designs
• Chip Aging Opens Up New Attack Vectors

More reporting this week:

• Startup Funding: Q1 2025
• Benefits And Challenges In Multi-Die Assemblies
• Need For KGD Drives Singulated Die Screening

Markets and Money

Deals and M&A:

• Qualcomm acquired Vietnam-based MovianAI, an advanced GenAI lab.
• IBM and TEL inked a new five-year joint R&D agreement, focused on smaller nodes and chiplet architectures.
• STMicroelectronics and China-based Innoscience signed a GaN technology.
• Siemens acquired Dotmatics, life sciences R&D SW provider for $5.1 billion.
• Siemens and Accenture formed a new group to co-develop and jointly market automation, industrial AI, and software solutions.
• AMD completed its $4.9 billion acquisition of ZT Systems.
• Electronic-photonic chip maker Black Semiconductor acquired Applied Nanolayers, a specialist in graphene production and transfer.

Fundings:

• Arizona-based power device maker IceMOS closed $22 million in funding.
• Retym emerged from stealth with $75 million for programmable coherent DSP solutions.
• AttoTude raised $50 million in Series B for its THz radios over wire interconnect technology.
• GS Microelectronics secured $18 million for its analog and RF IP products.
• Phlux Technology raised £9 million for antimonide-based semiconductor infrared sensors.
• Lumai raised more than $10 million to use optical processing to accelerate LLMs and other transformer-based AI.
• InfiniLink closed a $10 million seed round for its silicon photonics integrated optical transceiver chiplets.

Reports:

• The panel level packaging market will grow from $160 million to $600+ million during the 2024-2030 timeframe, reports Yole.
• Arm launched its AI Readiness Index Report. It found that while many organizations are currently using AI applications, less than half have a comprehensive strategy in place.

Latest earnings and financial updates: SMIC, Wolfspeed.

People

KC Ang is the new president and head of Tata’s semiconductor manufacturing business in India.

Craig Child is the new director of the CHIPS for America EUV Accelerator, located in Albany, New York.

Education and Training

The European Chips Skills Academy, an EU-funded project coordinated by SEMI Europe, announced the launch of the ECS Summer School 2025.

Princeton University opened the NJ AI Hub, a flexible space designed to advance AI R&D, ethical use of AI for positive social impact, and workforce training in applied AI.

Security

Two CHERI Alliance founding members, lowRISC and SCI Semiconductor, released the open-source Sunburst Chip repository, accelerating the path to market for commercial CHERIoT-based secure MCUs and supporting industry adoption and innovation.

DARPA selected Cerebras’ wafer-scale technology and Ranovus’ wafer-scale co-packaged optics to develop a state-of-the-art high-performance computing system.

National security advisory organization MITRE published: “Response to the Office of Management and Budget RFI on Advancing the Domestic Manufacturing of Semiconductors.”

Recent security research:

• ThreatLens: LLM-guided Threat Modeling and Test Plan Generation for HW Security Verification (U. of Florida)
• BugWhisperer: Fine-Tuning LLMs for SoC HW Vulnerability Detection (U. of Florida)
• FLEXPROF: Flexible, Side-Channel-Free Memory Access (U. of Utah)
• Do Not Skip over the Offline: Verifiable Silent Preprocessing from Small Security HW
• OpenVPN TLS-Crypt-V2 Key Wrapping with HW Security Modules (Humboldt Univ. of Berlin)

CISA and partners released a security advisory on “Fast Flux,” a threat exploiting gaps in network defenses, and  also issued a number of alerts/advisories.

Product News

Keysight introduced a portfolio of solutions to validate AI cluster components from the physical layer through the application layer using real-world AI workload emulation. It includes software to evaluate how new algorithms, data center infrastructure components, and protocols impact the performance of AI training.

Cadence unveiled eUSB2V2 PHY and controller IP built on the TSMC N3P process with asymmetrical link modes up to 4.8Gbps or symmetrical configurations from 960Mbps to 4.8Gbps.

RTX’s SEAKR Engineering will use Movellus’ clock generation IP platform for its next-generation radiation-tolerant ASIC designs used in spacecraft payload electronics.

Infineon released a DTO247 package, the size of two TO247 packages, for its TRENCHSTOP H7 IGBTs (insulated gate bipolar transistors) with a nominal current rating of up to 350 A, ideal for solar and energy storage. The company also released its Power PROFET + 24/48V switch family with low on-resistance of 1.5 mΩ for optimal automotive power distribution in demanding environments, with an expected lifetime of more than 1,000,000 switching cycles versus the average 200,000 cycles of conventional relays.

Ansys’ electrostatic discharge (ESD) reliability analysis solution was certified for TSMC’s N2 silicon process, along with Ansys’ cloud-based EDA platform.

Research

Fraunhofer IIS researched a splitting method that allows satellites of different classes to be integrated into the 5G network even if they can’t act as complete base stations.

Energy company Baker Hughes solved a 2.2-billion-cell axial turbine simulation with Ansys‘ Fluent fluid simulation software and 1,024 AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s exascale supercomputer.

Caltech researchers worked with extremely thin flakes of an iron-based superconductor and discovered a new superconducting state.

Harvard University engineers created a photon router that could enable superconducting quantum networks and a bilayer device that can control many forms of polarized light.

Columbia Engineering researchers used DNA to create 3D devices with nanometer-size features, featuring a bottom-up way for 3D electronics to build themselves.

KIST researchers developed upconversion nanoparticles that can absorb infrared and display full-color luminescence, with potential for the display sector and for security materials to prevent forgery and tampering.

Researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Harvard, and U. Penn used Coaxial Direct Ink Writing (DIW) to invent 3D color-responsive materials with potential for smart textiles and advanced robotics.

UC Berkeley engineers created a tiny flying robot. It is wireless and an external magnetic field causes it to spin and generate lift.

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