Chip Industry Week in Review

The Chinese Academy of Sciences unveiled a fully automated processor chip design system, claiming the potential to accelerate semiconductor development and replace human programmers.

Micron Technology plans to expand its U.S. investments to approximately $150 billion in domestic memory manufacturing and $50 billion in R&D, which is $30 billion higher than previously reported.

AMD launched its new MI350 series GPUs, claiming it’s 35X faster in inferencing than its predecessors.

Harvard‘s “Critical and Emerging Technologies Index” report ranked 25 countries across five sectors — AI, semiconductors, biotech, space and quantum. While the U.S. dominates in all sectors, its lead is at risk. [The semiconductor sector deep-dive starts on page 21 of the 71 page report.]

Fig. 1: Global semiconductor breakdown by country. Source: Rosenbach, Eric, Lea Baltussen, Eleanor Crane, Ethan Kessler, Lukasz Kolodziej, Ethan Lee, Alexandre Meyer, Cynthia Tong, Britney Tran and Delaney Wehn. “Critical and Emerging Technologies Index.” June 5, 2025

IBM said it will deliver its Quantum Starling by 2029, a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer capable of running quantum circuits comprising 100 million quantum gates on 200 logical qubits.

Q1 global foundry revenue dropped 5.4% QoQ to $36.4 billion, mainly due to seasonality, but partially offset by last-minute orders ahead of anticipated tariffs, reports TrendForce.

Fig. 2: Q1 global foundry revenue. Source: TrendForce June 2025

Meanwhile, revenue for the global IC design industry in Q1 2025 rose 6% QoQ to US$77 billion, a new record that was fueled by early stocking ahead of U.S. tariffs and ongoing construction of AI data centers, per TrendForce.

PCI-SIG published the PCIe 7.0 specification, which delivers 128.0 GT/s raw bit rate and up to 512 GB/s bi-directionally via x16 configuration with PAM4 signaling and Flit-based encoding. It also adds a PCIe retimer-based solution for implementing PCIe technology over optical fiber.

The Ultra Ethernet Consortium published the UEC 1.0 specification, an Ethernet-based communication stack for AI and HPC that aims to improve bandwidth, latency, and stability while being open and interoperable.

Latest financial reports: TSMC (May revenue).

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Markets and Money
Product News
Research
People
Security
Automotive/Aerospace
Events and Further Reading

Global

Asia:

• TSMC and the University of Tokyo opened a joint lab for semiconductor technology research with an emphasis on practical applications in the future, covering areas such as materials, devices, processes, metrology, packaging, and circuit design.

U.S.:

• Think tank ITIF makes the case for the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing tax credits to be renewed and also extend its applicability to IC design.
• CSIS‘ Sujai Shivakumar weighed in on what’s needed to maintain the U.S. edge in chip design and materials science, and to renew U.S. manufacturing, in congressional testimony last week.
• Natcast launched a call for proposals for the 2025 NSTC Workforce Awards Program, which will invest in semiconductor industry-related training and educational support for American workers to help close workforce and skills gaps for researchers, engineers, and technicians involved in semiconductor design and production.
• Amazon will invest $20 billion in Pennsylvania for cloud computing infrastructure and AI, and $10 billion in North Carolina.

Europe:

• The 58-partner GENESIS project was launched to develop more sustainable processes and technologies in the European semiconductor supply chain.
• The FAMES Pilot Line launched an educational initiative to help the European workforce develop the skills needed to leverage FD-SOI and other advanced technologies.
• The UK will provide up to £750 million in funding for a new supercomputer in Edinburgh, Scotland.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Low Power-High Performance newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:

• Special Report: The Best DRAMs For Artificial Intelligence
• RISC-V’s Increasing Influence
• Multi-Die Assemblies Complicate Parasitic Extraction
• Connecting AI Accelerators

The Test, Measurement and Analytics newsletter also published this week, featuring:

• Special Report: Rethinking Chip Reliability For Harsh Conditions
• Challenges In Using Sub-7nm ICs In Automotive
• High-Quality Data Needed To Better Utilize Fab Data Streams

Tech Talks this week:

• Agentic AI In Chip Design
• Big Changes In Medical Electronics

Markets and Money

Acquisitions and deals:

• IonQ intends to acquire Oxford Ionics, which develops ion-trap qubits manufactured on standard semiconductor chips, in a $1.075 billion mostly stock deal.
• Mycronic acquired Surfx Technologies, a provider of atmospheric plasma cleaning engines for integration into semiconductor packaging equipment.
• CoreWeave will provide compute capacity to Google‘s cloud unit. Then, Google will resell it to OpenAI to meet demand for services like ChatGPT, per Reuters.
• AMD acquired the team behind Untether AI, which had developed an at-memory compute architecture.

Fundings:

• Multiverse Computing raised $215 million for tech that compresses LLMs by up to 95%.
• Phoenix Semiconductor closed a $5.5 million seed funding aimed at recreating legacy chips.
• Rigetti Computing completed a $350 million equity offering.
• Volantis emerged from stealth with $9 million in funding for its photonic compute platform that uses direct laser modulation and wafer-scale integration.
• VLC Photonics, a Hitachi Group company, received a €4 million (~$6.2M) grant to advance photonic IC design and testing.
• VectorWave raised $2.5 million to commercialize an analog computing architecture that performs AI inference on raw radio frequency signals without pre-processing or digitization to improve spectrum utilization.

Reports:

• TECHCET forecasts a nearly 6% increase in CMP consumables revenue in 2025, reaching approximately $3.6 billion.
• Memory innovation solutions like LPDDR6, processing-in-memory (PIM), Wide I/O, advanced packaging techniques, and other approaches are crucial to achieve full agentic AI on the smart phone, per Counterpoint.

Product News

MIPS developed its first CPUs implementing the RISC-V architecture, branded eVocore and based on its older CPU designs adapted to the open-source instruction set. They are being validated on FPGAs.

In more PCIe news, Cadence announced a PCIe 7.0 subsystem, Synopsys demonstrated compatibility between its PCIe 6.x IP solution and Broadcom’s PEX90000 series switch, and Alphawave Semi showed off a PCIe 6.0-capable I/O chiplet.

Nordson Electronics Solutions developed a panel-level packaging solution for Powertech Technology that achieved yields greater than 99% for underfilling, mitigating warpage and optimizing fluid flow while decreasing cycle time.

pSemi uncorked its new RF-SOI platform technology with improved power handling, linearity, isolation, R_ON, C_OFF, and integrated intelligence.

NVIDIA GTC Paris:

• Cadence announced that Europe’s industrial AI ecosystem will be able to leverage its solvers accelerated by NVIDIA Blackwell systems by up to 80X from the industrial AI cloud.
• The NVIDIA Blackwell AI infrastructure deployments in the EU will deliver more than 3,000 exaflops of compute resources for sovereign AI.
• NVIDIA is building an Industrial AI Cloud to advance European manufacturing in applications such as design, engineering, simulation, factory digital twins, and robotics, with accelerated software support from Ansys, Cadence, and Siemens.
• NVIDIA announced partnerships with model builders and cloud providers across the EU and the Middle East to optimize sovereign LLMs.

Micron shipped HBM4 36GB 12-high samples to key customers, aimed at data center and cloud AI acceleration.

SK hynix presented a new DRAM roadmap. highlighting its use of the 4F² VG (vertical gate) platform and 3D DRAM technology for at 10nm and below.

At Augmented World Expo (AWE) USA, Qualcomm demonstrated a GenAI assistant running on smart glasses without support from a phone or the cloud, and introduced the Snapdragon AR1+ platform aimed at augmented reality. (Read more about AR/VR glasses)

Research

Sandia National Laboratory and German startup SpiNNcloud deployed the first large-scale SpiNNaker2 neuromorphic system at Sandia. Funded through the National Nuclear Security Administration, it is tasked with exploring how neuromorphic computing can impact critical nuclear deterrence missions.

Fig. 3: NERL Braunfels neuromorphic computer consists of three chassis, or frames, each capable of holding up to 18 boards with 48 chips on each board. Photo by Craig Fritz. Source: Sandia

Imec:

• Showed how to extend gate-all-around nanosheet transistors to the A10 node using a forksheet FET architecture that places the dielectric wall at the standard cell boundary.
• Demonstrated a GaN-on-Si E-mode MOSHEMT for 6G power amplifiers that reaches a record 27.8dBm (1W/mm) output power and 66% power-added efficiency at 13GHz and 5V.
• Announced a new 7-bit 150 GSa/s DAC, fabricated in a 5nm finFET CMOS process, achieving data rates of up to 300 Gb/s using PAM-4 modulation aimed at faster data center links.

MIT researchers developed a photonic processor aimed at 6G wireless signal processing, which leverages deep learning to be about 100X faster than the best digital alternative, with about 95% accuracy in signal classification.

Argonne National Laboratory researchers developed an approach to control the collective magnetic properties of atoms in real-time, with potential for next-gen information technologies and future quantum computers.

Cimolai Technology, a lifting and handling company, adopted Siemens‘ Xcelerator portfolio of industry software to manage large-scale assemblies more efficiently and improve collaboration between engineering and production teams.

Find more chip industry research here.

Security

NIST Guidance:

• Metrics and Methodology for Hardware Security Constructs
• NIST Offers 19 Ways to Build Zero Trust Architectures

Fig. 4:  Framework of multiple vulnerabilities interacting with ZTA. Source: NIST

The NICE Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity from NIST is engaging with many industry sectors to understand how AI might affect the cybersecurity workforce.

Infineon reached a milestone, shipping more than 10 billion security controllers with its Integrity Guard security architecture.

ZeroRISC, a silicon supply chain integrity solutions provider, closed on $10 million in seed funding to accelerate commercial adoption of open-source silicon for secure devices.

Recent security research:

• All You Need is XOR-Convolution: A Generalized Higher-Order Side-Channel Attack with Application to XEX/XE-based Encryptions (Kyoto University et al.)
• ABC-FHE: A Resource-Efficient Accelerator Enabling Bootstrappable Parameters for Client-Side Fully Homomorphic Encryption (KAIST)
• PoSyn: Secure Power Side-Channel Aware Synthesis (University of Texas at Dallas et al.)
• Understanding the Error Sensitivity of Privacy-Aware Computing (University of Buenos Aires et al.)

CISA issued a number of alerts/advisories.

Automotive/Aerospace

The automotive industry is producing vehicles with increasing levels of real-time decision-making, enabled by thousands of ICs, sensors, and multi-chip packages, but making sure these systems work flawlessly throughout their expected lifetimes is a growing challenge.

A recent AAA survey revealed that Americans are slow to adopt EVs, citing barriers including high battery repair costs.

Sensors:

• Infineon launched an inductive sensor with high-precision torque and angle measurements to enhance performance in automotive chassis applications.
• Infineon also expanded its PSOC 4 HV MCU platform with the PSOC 4 HVMS product family, which is optimized for space-constrained sensing or actuator applications.
• Sony Semiconductor Solutions will release the IMX479 stacked, dToF SPAD depth sensor for automotive lidar systems, delivering both high-resolution and high-speed distance measuring performance.

Gallox Semiconductors, a startup that emerged from Cornell University, won the 2025 Hello Tomorrow Global Challenge in the Advanced Computing & Electronics category with their gallium oxide semiconductor, which has potential applications in space technology, aviation and electric vehicle charging.

As chips venture further into harsh and unpredictable environments — a vacuum in space, electrified drivetrains, and the inside of jet engines — the industry is rethinking what reliability really means.

Turbotech leveraged Ansys’ simulation to validate its hydrogen turbine propulsion system, which can operate with high efficiency and produce zero carbon emissions for light aviation, and Wingcopter used Ansys tools to scale its VTOL drones that deliver medical supplies.

Sivers Semiconductors won a contract from aiRadar to develop an advanced 28 GHz antenna module.

Aethero secured $8.4 million to build next-gen space-based computing anad autonomous spacecraft.

Recent automotive research:

• Generating Automotive Code: Large Language Models for Software Development and Verification in Safety-Critical Systems (TU Munich)
• Security First, Safety Next: The Next-Generation Embedded Sensors for Autonomous Vehicles (University of Minho)

People

T.C. Chen was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in recognition of his central role in the qualification of generation after generation of semiconductor technologies in his four decades at IBM.

Bill Atkinson passed away. He pioneered visual interfaces on early Macintosh computers, revolutionizing the home computer industry.

A group of DuPont scientists and engineers were named 2025 Heroes of Chemistry by the American Chemical Society for a program that enabled progress in semiconductor lithography.

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here, including these topics:

• Eliminate Late Stage BOM Issues – Design Smarter from the Start
• Reimagine Semiconductor Fab Operations with the Digital Twin
• Digital Engineering for ePowertrain Development for Automotive
• High Performance Hierarchical IR Signoff for Large SoCs and 3D-ICs

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