Chip Industry Week In Review

GlobalFoundries plans to acquire MIPS, adding RISC-V processor IP and PPA optimization software capabilities to its foundry offerings. MIPS will continue to operate as a standalone business within GF. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2025.

The EU rolled out new general-purpose AI rules this week to limit copyright infringement, protect public safety, and require transparency about the sources used for training algorithms.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) published two reports this week:

• Global semiconductor sales hit $59 billion during the month of May 2025, an increase of 19.8% compared to May 2024 and 3.5% more than April 2025.
• The annual State of the U.S. Semiconductor Industry report provides a 29 page snapshot of U.S. IC industry progress, challenges, opportunities and the stakes involved.

Fig.1: Projected increase in U.S. fab capacity versus the global average. Source: SIA’s State Of The Industry Report

PwC predicts that 32% of global semiconductor production will be reliant on a copper supply that is considered to be ‘at-risk’ due to climate change. Meanwhile, President Trump threatened to impose a 50% tariff on U.S. copper imports, effective Aug. 1, causing copper prices to surge.

The growing reliance on 2.5D and 3D integration, hybrid bonding, and wafer-level processes has made it much harder to detect defects consistently and early enough to protect yields. While optical inspection remains central to process control, it is evolving in ways that are challenging long-held assumptions about where and how it can be applied.

Microtronic introduced a way to monitor the weights of semiconductor wafers at the same time as defects are being inspected, with resolution as low as 0.1 mg for tracking changes in wafer mass between process steps and between different wafers in a lot.

JEDEC released a new LPDDR6 standard to boost mobile and AI memory performance, power efficiency, and security by employing a dual sub-channel architecture that allows for flexible operation while maintaining a small access granularity of 32 bytes. It features 2 sub-channels per die and 12 data signal lines per sub-channel to optimize channel performance capabilities.

Recent financials:  Samsung (consolidated), TSMC June revenue report.

Quick links to more news:

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

Global

Americas:

• SecureFoundry expanded its U.S. semiconductor manufacturing capabilities and reverse-engineering services for prototyping, short-run manufacturing, and production of obsolete parts.
• CSIS weighed in on the impacts of the U.S. finalized budget on minerals needed for electric vehicles, semiconductors, and other key sectors.
• Hudson’s Bill Drexel digs into how two recent AI copyright court decisions will impact U.S. competition with China for technological primacy.

Asia:

• CSET examined the risks for 17 leading tech companies with deep investments in Taiwan in case of a China-Taiwan conflict.
• China is seeking more than 100,000 banned Nvidia chips to power new data centers in its northwestern desert, reports Bloomberg.
• SoftBank partnered with Nokia on an outdoor trial using the 7GHz band to evaluate how 6G area coverage compares to 5G in urban areas. (Read more about 5G/6G)
• Singapore opened its National Semiconductor Translation and Innovation Centre for gallium nitride.

Europe:

• A former ASML employee was sentenced to three years in prison for sharing sensitive company technology with Russia.
• Groq, in collaboration with Equinix, established its first European data center in Helsinki, Finland, aimed at boosting capacity for AI inference.
• A new EU-funded consortium called SUPREME will establish a pilot line to develop stable fabrication processes for European superconducting quantum chips with improved repeatability and yield.

In-Depth

Markets and Money

Analog Devices launched ADVentures, a corporate venture capital fund focused on identifying and investing in emerging opportunities in three domains — Advanced Systems & Robotics, Climate & Energy, and Human Health.

Reports:

• • NAND flash contract prices are expected to rise 5% to 10% in Q3 2025, while low smartphone demand is limiting eMMC and UFS growth, per TrendForce.
  • SEMI reports that advanced photoresist materials make up 80% of revenues in the wafer fab materials market.
  • TECHCET predicts the global semiconductor chip manufacturing materials market will grow 6% in 2025.
  • More reports: DDR4 contract prices, sputtering target revenues, advanced IC substrate market.

Deals:

• Smartkem and Manz Asia inked a deal for co-development of next-generation dielectric ink solutions for advanced packaging, particularly tailored for AI chip applications.
• Incize and Atomera teamed up to optimize GaN-on-Si device performance for high-frequency and high-power applications.
• STMicroelectronics and Metalenz signed an agreement enabling the proliferation of metasurface optics across high-volume consumer, automotive, and industrial markets.

Funding:

• SiPearl achieved the definitive closing of its €130m Series A funding with a third tranche of €32m for the tape-out of the Rhea1 chip, which will be used in the JUPITER exascale supercomputer. SiPearl was seed funded by the EU.
• Arago raised $26 million in seed funding for its photonic AI chip.
• Ambiq, which specializes in ultra-low-power chips for edge AI, filed its registration statement for its proposed initial public offering.
• Maieutic Semiconductor raised $4.15 million for its generative AI copilot for analog chip design.
• Xpanceo raised $250 million to develop smart contact lenses.

Security

Infineon introduced the ID Key family, designed to protect a wide range of USB-devices and applications, including tokens, dongles, security keys, and other hardware authenticators.

Seven security experts discussed the best ways to fend off threats from AI-based attacks, from jail-breaking an AI to security and integrity of AI training data.

Recent security research:

• NVIDIA GPU Confidential Computing: Threat Model And Security Insights (IBM Research, Ohio State)
• Per-Row Activation Counting on Real Hardware: Demystifying Performance Overheads (University of Seoul)
• Hardware Trojans in Superconducting Electronic Circuits (University of Rochester)
• A TRNG Implemented using a Soft-Data Based Sponge Function within a Unified Strong PUF Architecture (University of New Mexico)
• EIM-TRNG: Obfuscating Deep Neural Network Weights with Encoding-in-Memory True Random Number Generator via RowHammer (New Jersey Institute of Technology)

CISA issued a number of new alerts/advisories.

Research

TSMC demonstrated a silicon-based liquid cooling solution, Si-integrated micro cooler (IMC-Si), on a 3.3X-reticle CoWoS-R package.

A researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University developed an alternative, more environmentally friendly method of producing quantum dots, using proteins at room temperature in water.

Researchers at MIT developed a fully autonomous robotic system that can measure photoconductance faster and more accurately than other AI methods. Potential applications include characterizing important properties of new semiconductor materials and spurring the development of solar panels that produce more electricity.

Researchers at Argonne and the University of Chicago developed an advanced membrane technology that extracts lithium from water, as demand for lithium and concern about supply grows. Lithium is used for a variety of electronics, including EVs, cellphones and laptops.

University of Münster researchers and partners published a technical paper titled, “The potential of multidimensional photonic computing.”

KAIST developed core NPU technology to boost ChatGPT inference performance by over 60%​.

Find more chip industry research here.

Product News

Cadence taped out memory IP for the JEDEC LPDDR6/5X standard that can operate at 14.4Gbps, which is up to 50% faster than the previous generation of LPDDR DRAM. Target markets include next-gen LLMs, agentic AI, and other compute-heavy workloads.

Fig. 2: Cadence IP system for the LPDDR6/5X standard. Source: Cadence

Infineon launched the third generation of the XENSIV 3D magnetic Hall-effect sensor family, comprising three product series. The sensor family provides integrated diagnostic functions to support functional safety applications up to ASIL-B, with potential use in consumer, and automotive applications.

Nordson Test & Inspection announced that smartTec will expand distribution of X-ray and test solutions to include Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

IBM released its autonomous Power11 servers for enterprise IT, offering twice the performance per watt compared to x86 servers and up to 28% better server efficiency, with innovations from silicon to applications. Slated for Q4, it will be the first IBM Power server to support its Spyre accelerator SoC, which was purpose-built for AI-intensive inference workloads.

KIOXIA America began sampling new universal flash storage (UFS) Ver. 4.1 embedded memory devices, aimed at next-gen mobile.

SambaNova announced SambaManaged, an inference-optimized data center product offering that is deployable in 90 days.

Education and Training

Interface and Centre for European Policy Studies released a new report titled, Solving Europe’s AI talent equation: Supply, demand and missing pieces, which analyzes current legislation, AI proficiency, and talent and job vacancies in Europe.

The AFT, in partnership with Microsoft and alongside the United Federation of Teachers, announced the launch of the National Academy for AI Instruction, a $23 million education initiative that will provide access to free AI training and curriculum for all 1.8 million members of the AFT.

Automotive

NXP Semiconductors announced its new 18-channel Li-ion battery cell controller family, designed for HVBMS, ESS and 48 V battery management systems.

Microchip partnered with camera module supplier Nippon Chemi-Con and video-testing solution provider NetVision to create an ASA-ML camera-development platform and bring it to the Japanese automotive market. The platform will include critical hardware-based link-layer security.

Elektrobit announced EB tresos AutoCore Light, a scalable SDV software designed for peripheral ECUs, like smart sensors and actuators.

Quantum

Aeluma announced a new contract with NASA, aimed at commercializing entangled photon sources for quantum computing and communication systems, and a new U.S. Navy contract for low SWaP imaging sensors for next-gen submarine systems.

Funding:

• Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information secured a multi-million dollar government award to help establish a National Quantum Computing Center of Excellence, to be supported by IonQ’s quantum system.
• QEDMA raised $26 million in Series A funding, with participation from IBM, to tackle quantum computing errors and speed to quantum advantage.
• QuiX Quantum secured €15 million in Series A funding for a first-gen universal photonic quantum
• Groove Quantum received €10 million (~$11.8M) to advance germanium-based quantum computing.

Research:

• Physicists from Aalto University achieved qubit coherence time of 1 millisecond.
• Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology and the universities of Milan, Granada, and Tokyo, found a way to simulate error-correctable quantum computers.
• University of Rochester researchers found a way to efficiently move information within a multi-level system using qudits.

The IBM Quantum Learning library of open-access content is now available on the IBM Quantum Platform, and the company also launched Qiskit classroom modules.

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• CadenceTECHTALK: In-Design Thermal Analysis Within Virtuoso Design Platform
• Semiconductor Ecosystem Overview Virtual Training U.S. & EU (SEMI University)
• Security for Data in Motion: Inline Memory Encryption & MACsec
• Understanding Semiconductor Technology and Business: Virtual Training Asia (SEMI University)
• How to Leverage PSpice for Pre-Layout Simulation

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

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