Chip Industry Week In Review


Notable deals Cadence and Intel Foundry inked a multi-year agreement to advance design technology co-optimization and create PDKs for Intel Foundry's 14A process. Nvidia and SK hynix announced a multi-year partnership to co-develop memory technology for AI infrastructure and physical AI. Teradyne unveiled an integrated test cell solution with TEL that supports known-good device scree... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Jun. 2


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: Technical Paper Research Organizations Physical Foundation Models: Fixed HW implementations of large-scale neural networks 🔗 Yale University, Cornell University, Boston University, NTT Research Understanding Inference Scaling for LLMs: Bottlenecks, Trade-offs, and Performance Princip... » read more

Improving GPU Energy Efficiency With Component-Level Power Management (AMD)


Researchers from AMD released “CompPow: A Case for Component-level GPU Power Management”. Abstract “The ever increasing demand for ML-driven intelligence in a wide spectrum of domains has led to ubiquity of GPUs. At the same time, GPUs are notorious for their power consumption needs and often dominate power allocation in a typical ML datacenter. While datacenter-level power opti... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Advanced nodes and packaging AMD announced more than $10B in Taiwan ecosystem investments to scale advanced packaging manufacturing for AI infrastructure. The effort includes EFB-based 2.5D packaging collaborations with ASE and others. AMD also announced the start of its production ramp of its Venice processors on TSMC's 2nm process. Lam Research established a panel-level packaging cen... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Global The U.S. created a licensing path for Nvidia H200 shipments in January and has since approved sales to 10 Chinese companies, but so far no shipments have been confirmed, reports Reuters. With a looming end-of-year expiration, SIA, SEMI, and other business groups are urging Congress to extend the US semiconductor tax credit and expand it to cover semiconductor design and other act... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Acquisitions and business pivots Teradyne acquired Israel-based TestInsight, a semiconductor test provider with pattern conversion, validation, and virtual test capabilities. Credo plans to acquire DustPhotonics, a developer of silicon photonics PICs for optical transceivers. Molex plans to acquire Teramount, a provider of detachable, passive-alignment fiber-to-chip connectivity solu... » read more

AI Growing Impact On Chip Design And EDA Tools


Key Takeaways Many workflows in the data center are customer-specific, which is part of the reason there is so much interest in agentic AI-enabled tools. Large systems companies are pressing EDA vendors for performance improvements to keep pace with their AI workflows. The makeup of design teams is changing as AI infiltrates more of the chip design process. Experts at the Ta... » read more

Startup Funding: Q1 2026


The new year started off with a bang for private semiconductor companies, with 18 garnering mega funding rounds exceeding $100 million, and two, Rapidus and Cerebras, reaching the $1 billion mark. Predictably, the vast majority of those are either designing chips primarily for AI inference workloads or attempting to overcome bandwidth limitations by improving interconnects from the chip level t... » read more

AI’s Potential And Limitations In Chip Design


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the opportunities and challenges of using AI in chip design, with Thomas Andersen, vice president for AI & Machine Learning at Synopsys; Sridhar Boinapally, senior director of analog/mixed signal tools/flow at Intel; Alex Starr, corporate fellow at AMD; Stuart Oberman, vice president for GPU hardware engineering at Nvidia; ... » read more

Beating The Heat In 3D Packages


Key Takeaways: Thermal management is a central design constraint, requiring early, thorough planning. Accurate thermal simulation requires AI-driven adaptive meshing and real-world validation. Innovative STCO strategies can drastically reduce GPU peak temperature. As HPC and AI accelerators push power densities to 1kW and beyond, the heat generated by rapidly switching tran... » read more

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