Chip Industry Week in Review


Samsung and SK hynix joined OpenAI's Stargate initiative to ensure there will be enough memory chips to meet the needs of AI data centers. The goal is to produce up to 900,000 DRAM wafer starts per month. OpenAI also inked agreements to explore the development of next-gen data centers in Korea. Axcelis Technologies (ion implantation systems) will merge with Veeco Instruments (compound semic... » read more

New Spectre Branch Target Injection, Spectre-BTI, Attack Primitives On CPUs (ETH Zurich)


A new technical paper titled “VMSCAPE: Exposing and Exploiting Incomplete Branch Predictor Isolation in Cloud Environments” was published by researchers at ETH Zurich. Abstract “Virtualization is a cornerstone of modern cloud infrastructures, providing the required isolation to customers. This isolation, however, is threatened by speculative execution attacks which the CPU vendors att... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The U.S. is considering annual approvals for Samsung and SK hynix to export chipmaking tools and materials to their factories in China, replacing perpetual waivers granted under the validated end user system, reports Bloomberg. The proposal, presented by the U.S. Commerce Department to South Korean officials, would require the companies to reapply each year for specific quantities of restricted... » read more

What Do LLMs Want from Hardware


Figure 1: Noam Shazeer, Google Gemini vice president, presented this in his Hot Chips 2025 talk. Noam Shazeer is Google’s vice president of engineering for Gemini, their LLM competitor to ChatGPT. He talked recently at Hot Chips: “Predictions for the Next Phase of AI." He has worked on LLMs for a decade since inventing the transformer model in 2017. As his slide says, LLMs can take adv... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Microsoft, OpenAI, and NVIDIA warned about power swings and physical damage to power grids increasing from AI training workloads and jointly proposed a multi-pronged approach to stabilize power in AI training data centers. Meanwhile, Anthropic issued a warning about the weaponization of agentic AI in a new 25-page Threat Intelligence report. Key concerns involve the evolution in AI-assisted ... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: August 26


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=467 /] Find more semiconductor research papers here. » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


The EU’s tariffs on semiconductors will not exceed 15%, according to Trump’s latest trade deal. In addition, the EU committed to purchasing at least $40 billion worth of U.S. AI chips as well as other investments. [FAQ is here.] Lifelines for Intel: Intel inked a deal to sell the U.S. government a 10% non-voting equity stake in its business, worth $8.9 billion. The stake will be fun... » read more

Overview: Ultra Ethernet’s Design and Architectural Advancements (ETH Zurich, Broadcom, HPE et al.)


A new technical paper titled "Ultra Ethernet's Design Principles and Architectural Innovations" was published by researchers at ETH Zurich, Broadcom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, OpenAI, Intel, Microsoft, AMD and Cisco. Abstract "The recently released Ultra Ethernet (UE) 1.0 specification defines a transformative High-Performance Ethernet standard for future Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Lines are blurring between government and industry: On the heels of last week's resignation demand, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan met with President Trump on Monday, with the President later saying, "The meeting was a very interesting one. His success and rise is an amazing story."  Now, Bloomberg reports the Trump administration is in talks with Intel for the U.S. government to take a stake in th... » read more

Best Practices to Optimize Infrastructure for Simulations


Our Best Practices Guide equips you with expert strategies for leveraging high-performance computing (HPC) to maximize Ansys workload efficiency and overcome common challenges. As simulation complexity increases, a robust computing infrastructure is essential for rapid and large-scale modeling. Modern HPC systems provide: High-core-count CPUs for superior memory and compute perfo... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →