Chip Industry Week in Review

Intel reported flat year-over year revenue for Q2, exceeding Wall Street’s pessimistic expectations. In a message to employees, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the company will:

• Cut about 15% of its staff, ending the year with about 75,000 employees, down from a high of nearly 132,000 in 2022;
• Scrap projects in Poland and Germany, consolidate other sites in central America and Southeast Asia, and slow construction in Ohio;
• Double down on 18A and 18A-P processes, continue developing 14A, reintroduce simultaneous multi-threading in the data center, and focus on a cohesive silicon, system, and software stack strategy for AI.

NVIDIA announced it is working to bring CUDA to RISC-V architectures so that RISC-V CPUs can be used as the main application processor in NVIDIA systems. No timeline was given.

The White House released America’s AI Action Plan, identifying more than 90 policy actions. The Trump administration also accelerated federal permitting of data center infrastructure development, releasing a fact sheet with details on the executive order. Guardrails on AI were notably absent.

Meanwhile, China appears to have built too many AI data centers. The country announced plans to funnel compute power through three networks to a centralized platform, from where it can be sold, Reuters reported.

The looming 50% tariff on copper imports to the U.S. rankled the market, hiking up prices and creating an urgency to rush shipments prior to the August 1 deadline. Half of U.S. copper consumption — a critical component in chips, data centers, and EVs, among other things — relies on imports. CSIS highlighted the consequences of the copper tariffs, providing policy recommendations, including elimination of tariffs with strategic allies, adopting more product-specific tariffs, offering tax credits, and government equity investments.

As part of a bilateral trade deal, Japan agreed to invest $550 billion in the U.S. for semiconductor manufacturing research, critical minerals, energy infrastructure and other sectors. Timetables and other details are sketchy, at best.

STMicroelectronics plans to purchase part of NXP‘s MEMS sensor business for up to US$950 million in cash.

SEMI released its latest forecasts of global equipment sales, among the highlights:

Fig.1: Semiconductor manufacturing equipment 2025 growth predictions. Source: Semiconductor Engineering, based on SEMI’s numbers

McKinsey released its +100 page Technology Trends Outlook 2025 report, which provides perspective for 13 frontier technologies trends, including agentic AI and application-specific semiconductors.

Harvard’s Belfer Center analyzed the importance of three critical emerging technologies to national security and offered AI chip policy recommendations.

AMD CEO Lisa Su said her company is paying 5% to 20% more for TSMC’s U.S. chips versus those sourced from Taiwan, adding that the incremental cost is worth it for a more resilient supply chain, reports Bloomberg.

Quick links to more news:

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

Global

USA:

• The United Nations‘ leader called on the world’s major tech firms to power data centers completely with renewables by 2030.
• Oracle and OpenAI agreed to develop 4.5 gigawatts of additional Stargate data center capacity in the U.S., together with the Stargate I site in Abilene, Texas. The platform will have 5 gigawatts running over 2 million chips.
• An X data center fire in Oregon began in the power cabinet, according to a fire department report obtained by Wired. This follows a data center fire at Telecom Egypt that killed four workers.
• SIA updated its U.S. Semiconductor Ecosystem Map which includes facilities across manufacturing, chip design, IP and EDA, and R&D.

Europe:

• Air Liquide will build a €250 million high-purity semiconductor gas plant in Dresden, Germany.
• The Swiss IC industry is planning a national chip production and research center to develop and produce bespoke chips, including ICs for robotics, self-driving vehicles, satellite communication and quantum computing.

Asia:

• Taiwan announced plans to launch its “Ten Major AI Infrastructure Projects Initiative,” hoping to generate more than $500 billion by 2040. Targets include silicon photonics, quantum, and robotics.
• Malaysia secured more than RM63 billion (~US $14B) in semiconductor investments, the prime minister revealed this week, notably from Infineon, NXP, and Carsem.
• China is submerging data centers in the ocean to keep them cool.
• Indian Institutes of Technology students have designed 20 chipsets and taped out 8 ahead of the country’s first commercial-scale, India-made semiconductor chip, which is expected this year.
• Air Liquide opened its new molybdenum manufacturing plant in South Korea.

In-Depth Reporting from Semiconductor Engineering this week:

Two special reports:

• CMOS 2.0: Layered Logic For The Post-Nanosheet Era: imec’s 3D platform upends the way devices are built.
•  Crisis Ahead: Power Consumption In AI Data Centers: Four key areas where chips can help manage AI’s insatiable power appetite.

Two top stories from the Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials newsletter:

• The Rise Of Panel-Level Packaging
• Machine Learning Tools Help Bridge Design-To-Manufacturing Gap

Plus two videos and one roundtable:

• Chiplet Ecosystem Slowly Emerges
• Video: AI In The IC Equipment Ecosystem
• Video: Accelerating IP Reuse

Markets and Money

Fundings:

• Edge AI company Ambiq kicked off its IPO.
• Palo Alto-based xLight raised $40 million to develop EUV free electron lasers for advanced semi manufacturing. Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s former CEO and CTO, is executive chairman of the startup’s board.

Fig. 2: xLight’s EUV Free Electron Laser (EUV-FEL).

Deals:

• FuriosaAI won a contract to supply LG AI Research with RNGD AI chips to power its Exaone LLMs, just months after the Seoul startup rejected an $800 million acquisition bid from Meta, per Bloomberg.
• Keysight confirmed it is still engaged with the State Administration for Market Regulation of the People’s Republic of China in connection with its proposed acquisition of Spirent.

Reports:

• Other financial releases this week: ASM, Besi, MaxLinear, NVE, NXP, SK hynix, Soitec, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, and Teledyne.
• The global data center processor market will rise from $147 billion in 2024 to $372 billion by 2030 due to GenAI, according to Yole.
• The data center PSU (power supply unit) market will hit $14 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 15% from 2024, reports Yole.
• More reports this week: Silicon parts revenue (TECHCET)

Product News

The Open Compute Project Foundation formed a new Optical Circuit Switching sub-project to help partners collaborate on the technology to meet the connectivity demands of high bandwidth, low latency, and energy efficiency in data-intensive applications.

Siemens and UMC collaborated to advance EM/IR drop analysis with mPower technology, enabling more accurate analysis on larger layouts. UMC successfully used mPower’s automated processes to perform SRAM full-chip circuit analysis, delivering precise IR drop distribution assessments and enabling early-stage risk detection.

Faraday announced the availability of its DDR/LPDDR combo PHY, supporting from 3rd to 5th-generation on UMC’s 22ULP planar process and 14FFC FinFET process.

Bluespec used Axiomise’s formal verification tools to verify its latest RISC-V core, assisting with identifying bugs and building exhaustive proofs of correctness.

AIchip unveiled its 2nm design platform for high-performance and AI ASIC designs.

Whalechip licensed Arteris’ physically aware FlexNoC 5 interconnect IP for use in the design of a custom ASIC aimed at an advanced near-memory computing (NMC) architecture.

Hailo AI announced commercial availability of its edge AI accelerator with GenAI capabilities.

Cadence released Virtuoso Studio IC23.1 ISR15, allowing users to choose the plot type for an output in the Plot Target column of the Outputs Setup tab even before running a simulation.

ACM Research announced upgrades to its Ultra C wet bench cleaning tool, including a nitrogen bubbling technology to solve poor wet etching uniformity and by-product regrowth, patent-pending.

Memory:

• Micron launched a high-density, radiation-tolerant single-layer cell NAND with a die capacity of 256 gigabits (Gb), to be followed by space-qualified NOR and DRAM solutions.
• KIOXIA released its LC9 series PCIe 5.0 enterprise 76 TB NVMe SSD, with 32-die stack BiCS FLASH QLC 3D flash memory for GenAI environments.
• Teledyne HiRel Semiconductors released a compact DDR4 memory module, screened and qualified as an Enhanced Product and rated for operation from –40°C to +105°C.
• Sandisk formed a technical advisory board to guide the development and strategy of its high bandwidth flash (HBF) memory technology.

Research

Researchers at KU Leuven, imec, and Intel investigated strain retention in CFETs through coupled mechanical and device simulations, offering integration-relevant suggestions for scalable strain engineering.

LLNL-led researchers published Neuromorphic ionic computing in droplet interface synapses.

A University of Mississippi professor is working on analog in-memory computing to boost AI energy efficiency.

Researchers at EPFL concluded that AI can’t see as well as humans. Humans excel at recognizing objects from fragments while AI struggles. This finding has real-world implications for AI use in autonomous vehicles, prosthetics, and robotics.

Materials research: 

• UCLA researchers discovered a new method for combining magnetic elements with semiconductors, producing materials containing up to 50% magnetic atoms. Current methods are often limited to no greater than 5%.
• Arizona State University and Cargill Bioindustrial will partner to research Cargill’s Priamine product, a single molecule made using naturally occurring fatty acids, and its potential to improve the performance and sustainability of semiconductor technologies.
• University of Michigan and Sandia researchers demonstrated ferroelectric ScAlN/AlGaN HEMTs. This discovery has potential for next-generation non-volatile, reconfigurable power applications and high-temperature memory applications.

Automotive

NXP CEO Kurt Sievers suggested the company will rebound in Q3 after a two-year slump, anticipating an inventory glut will end this year.

California’s DMV filed a lawsuit against Tesla, claiming it misled consumers about its self-driving capabilities.

Mixel announced support for Automotive SerDes Alliance Motion Link IP, which is compliant with the ASA Motion Link v2.1 specification. The IP supports transmitting and receiving downstream speeds of up to 8.0Gbps/lane with NRZ signaling, and implements extensive DFT. The Mixel PHY supports equalization features for dealing with different channels, environmental conditions, and data rates.

Wallbox and Leap launched virtual power plants in California and New York. The facilities aggregate energy capacity from residential EV chargers and connect to local energy programs that support the grid, functioning as a flexible, dispatchable resource.

Infineon and UL Solutions announced a partnership to accelerate the implementation of ISO 26262 functional safety compliance for Infineon’s automotive customers.

Reports:

• A CSIS report, Electric Vehicles, China, and the Industrial Strategies Reshaping Mobility in Emerging Economies, looks at the implications of EV growth, including global policy and the automotive sector as a whole.
• A McKinsey report identified the root causes of the lack of automotive OEM acceleration, including software development, like architecture, E/E development, feature development, and life cycle management 
• IDTechEx released “Software-Defined Vehicles, Connected Cars, and AI in Cars 2026-2036: Markets, Trends, and Forecasts.”

WeRide and Lenovo partnered to launch a 100% automotive-grade HPC 3.0 platform powered by NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor chips.

Proterial has developed high-performance, heavy-rare-earth-free neodymium sintered magnets materials for EV driving motors.

Education and Training

The SEMI Foundation announced that applications are open for organizations seeking to become Regional Nodes in the National Network for Microelectronics Education, a program to advance education, training, and employment pathways in the microelectronics sector. SEMI has also partnered with Arizona State University to expand access to high-impact, on-demand training for the global semiconductor workforce through course on AI, packaging and more.

Vietnamese universities gained access to over 1,000 semiconductor software tools through partnerships with companies including Siemens and Cadence. Overseas scholarship opportunities also are available through ASE, UMC, and more.

Security

The Idaho National Laboratory developed Consequence-driven Cyber-informed Engineering, a methodology used to identify the most essential processes and functions of critical infrastructure, then selectively reduce or eliminate the digital pathways that lead to cyberattack.

Computer scientists at Princeton and the University of California-San Diego have created a tool that safeguards C programming language systems while developers migrate them into safer languages, a process that will take years.

Research:

• SVAgent: AI Agent for Hardware Security Verification Assertion (Univ. of Florida)
• Deep learning-based profiling side-channel attacks in SPECK cipher (New York Univ.)
• Rethinking the confidential cloud through a unified low-level abstraction for composable isolation (Microsoft, et al)

CISA issued a number of alerts/advisories.

Quantum

Q.ANT delivered its native processing server (NPS) to the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, claiming it’s the first integration of an analog photonic co-processor into an operational HPC environment.

Oxford Ionics will design a fault-tolerant quantum architecture using Iceberg Quantum’s expertise in quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes, as part of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative.

Amazon Braket launched a new 54-qubit superconducting quantum processor from IQM Quantum Computers.

EnSilica, which designs mixed-signal ASICs, developed a combined hardware IP block that supports three different algorithms of the CRYSTALS post-quantum cryptography accelerator.

Researchers from Australian National University, Princeton University, and others published “Bottom-up fabrication of scalable room-temperature diamond quantum computing and sensing technologies.”

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• Building Trust Through Certification of Security Solutions
• Predictive Maintenance through Digital Twins and DME Workflows
• 448G: Ready or Not, Here it Comes!
• From Theory to Reality: NVIDIA GPUs in Modern Simulations

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

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