Chip Industry Week In Review

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The U.S. Department of Commerce is investigating TSMC for potential export control violations involving Huawei chips, reports Reuters. The probe follows TechInsights’ teardown of a Huawei AI accelerator chip last year. The foundry, meanwhile, maintains it has not shipped any chips to Huawei since 2020 and that it complies with all export regulations.

Meanwhile, TSMC’s net revenue increased ~47% in March compared to March of last year, and 10% higher than in February of this year.

Worldwide semiconductor manufacturing equipment sales rose 10% in 2024 to a record $117.1 billion, according to SEMI. Growth was led by surging investments in AI, advanced packaging, and high-bandwidth memory, with strong gains in both front-end wafer processing and back-end assembly and test. China led global spending with a 35% jump to nearly $50 billion, while Taiwan saw a 16% decline.

The 2D Materials Roadmap, a +100 page meaty draft report published by researchers at many institutions, examines high impact 2D materials — graphene, TMDs, MXenes and more — and includes current and future challenges and solutions.

In acquisitions:

• Infineon plans to acquire Marvell’s Automotive Ethernet business for US $2.5 billion to complement its MCU business and build up its capabilities for software defined vehicles, as well as new opportunities for physical AI.
• Siemens Digital Industries Software acquired DownStream Technologies, a provider of manufacturing data prep solutions for PCB design, to expand its portfolio of PCB tools for the small and medium-sized business market.

Google introduced Ironwood, its seventh-generation TPU and first designed specifically for inference in AI workloads. Ironwood delivers up to 42.5 Exaflops in its 9,216-chip configuration, 6x more HBM capacity, reaching 7.2 TBps per chip.

Fig.1: Tech specs for latest generation of TPU products. Source/permission: Google Cloud

IBM unveiled its z17 enterprise-scale AI mainframe, claiming a 40% growth in cache (versus z16), enabling more than 450 billion inferencing operations in a day and 1 millisecond response time in a hybrid cloud environment.

The UALink Consortium ratified the UALink 200G 1.0 Specification, which defines a low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect for communication between accelerators and switches in AI computing pods.

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Money and Reports
Security
Product News
Research
Events and Further Reading

Global

Global electricity consumption from AI chipmaking increased by more than 350% between 2023 and 2024, with a commensurate rise in emissions, reports Greenpeace.

Microsoft is “slowing or pausing” some early stage data center projects to “strategically pace” plans, including a $1 billion Ohio project.

Europe:

• The EU published its AI Continent Action Plan, aiming to become a global leader in AI by setting up a network of gigafactories with ~100,000 advanced AI chips, with public/private funding. The industry was quick to respond. Siddhi Pal, an AI policy researcher at Europe think tank Interface, said the plan inadequately addresses a key roadblock—talent.  OpenAI‘s feedback is here.
• Neumonda and Ferroelectric Memory (FMC) are collaborating on design, test, and marketing of FMC’s non-volatile DRAM+ in Germany.
• The Czech Semiconductor Centre launched to support European fabless companies with mentoring, financial guidance, access to advanced design tools, prototyping platforms, and small-scale chip production.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published two newsletters this week:

Test, Measurement and Analytics newsletter, featuring these articles:

• Why Thin Film Measurements Matter
• Nearly Invisible: Defect Detection Below 5nm
• Hunting For Macro Defects

Low Power-High Performance newsletter, with these top stories:

• Chiplet Tradeoffs and Limitations
• Implementing AI Activation Functions
• 3D-IC Ecosystem Starts To Take Form

Opinions

• 2030 Data Center AI Chip Winners: The Trillion Dollar Club
• An Inside Look At UPF 4.0

Money and Reports

Deals and more M&A:

• • Mycronic acquired RoBAT, a UK-based maker of high-frequency signal quality test equipment for bare board PCBs.
  • Arizona-based Spirit Electronics acquired Ohio-based SMART Microsystems.
  • Bosch and synthetic diamond company Element Six launched a joint venture, Bosch Quantum Sensing, to commercialize diamond-based quantum sensors.
  • HORIBA STEC Korea acquired South Korea-based EtaMax, a specialist in wafer inspection systems for compound semiconductors.

Fundings:

• • Rescale raised $115 million in Series D for its engineering platform that supports modeling and simulation for IC design.
  • Arena raised $30 million in Series B for its AI platform that accelerates hardware testing, debugging, and optimization.
  • Sparrow Quantum raised €21.5 million to develop its photonic quantum chips.
  • Blumind closed a CAD $20 million (~$14.1M) Series A round for its ultra-low-power analog AI chips for edge computing.
  • FaradaIC Sensors raised €4.5 million (~$4.9M) for its electrochemical gas sensors on a chip.
  • QPerfect, a quantum design automation company, received a €2 million investment from BTQ Technologies.
  • Nuro received $106 million to date for funding its autonomous driving technology.

Magnachip is shutting down its display driver IC business to focus on power ICs and discretes.

Cyient launched a semiconductor subsidiary to provide ASIC turnkey and IC design services.

The bi-partisan U.S. National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology released “Charting the Future of Biotechnology,” a comprehensive report strongly urging higher and immediate prioritization of biotech, particularly for national defense against China’s state-backed investments. CSIS’ breakdown on the report is here.

Security

Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) version 4.17 has been published, adding 3 new weaknesses, including two for hardware, and other updates.

Samsung Semiconductor included CVE-2025-22377 in this week’s security update for vulnerabilities in Exynos processors.

Keysight introduced a security testbench for side-channel analysis and fault injection testing of chips and embedded devices that integrates oscilloscopes, interfacing equipment, amplifiers, and trigger generators into a single PXIe chassis.

Is it possible to use AI to attack AI? Rambus‘ Scott Best highlights the need for robust security measures in AI systems.

IDC is predicting a ~12% growth in European security spending in 2025 due to increased threats as well as tighter regulations.

Recent research:

• • • A Survey on the Design, Detection, and Prevention of Pre-Silicon HW Trojans (Sandia)
    • HIPR: HW IP Protection through Low-Overhead Fine-Grain Redaction (U. of Florida)
    • A Methodology to Achieve Provable Side-Channel Security in Real-World Implementations (CryptoExperts, TU Graz et al.)

CISA issued a number of alerts/advisories.

Product News

Expedera received ISO 9001:2015 certification of its Quality Management System used in developing its NPU IP.

Siemens Digital Industries Software announced today that Tremonia Mobility GmbH, a leading manufacturer of minibuses, has adopted Siemens Xcelerator to accelerate the electrification and to optimize the development of its products for public transport, shuttle, and travel services.

Microchip rolled out its power management IC for high performance applications.

Kioxia, AIO Core, and Kyocera developed a prototype PCIe 5.0-compatible broadband SSD with an optical interface.

Research

Cornell, Princeton, and NYU researchers found training efficiency and inference performance was enhanced when using “Optically Connected Multi-Stack HBM Modules for Large Language Model Training and Inference.”

Sandia National Laboratories, the University of New Mexico, and Maxwell Labs are developing a method for cooling chip hotspots using lasers and a gallium arsenide cold plate.

Yale University-led researchers leveraged phonon-polaritons, a type of quasiparticle, to find a new method to dissipate the energy of high-speed electrons through the generation of long wavelength infrared light.

Researchers at University of Michigan developed a new technique for designing a slot antenna for the next generation of wireless technologies.

Emory University, Georgia Tech et al. created a blood clot on a chip model to evaluate the effectiveness of treatment options.

The UK launched an Integrated Quantum Networks Hub backed by £42 million (~$54M). Led by Heriot-Watt University, it aims to develop novel technologies, protocols, and industry standards necessary for the deployment of quantum communications infrastructure.

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here, including topics such as CFD tech trends, RF signals and CryptoManager architecture.

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