Chip Industry Week In Review


Deals, Funding Intel will join Elon Musk’s Terafab chip manufacturing project alongside Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. Intel described its role as helping refactor silicon fab technology for a project targeting production of 1 TW/year of compute for AI and robotics applications. Intel and Google are expanding a multi-year collaboration on AI and cloud infrastructure, with Intel Xeon processo... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Deals IBM and Arm are collaborating on a new dual‑architecture hardware aimed at enterprise AI and data-intensive workloads, using virtualization to boost reliability, security, scalability, and software compatibility. The goal, according to an IBM spokesperson, is to deliver side-by-side deployments of S390x-Linux and Arm-Linux virtual machines in a single kernel-based hypervisor. Nv... » 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

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Mar. 31


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: Technical Paper Research Organizations DiscoRD: An Experimental Methodology for Quickly Discovering the Reliable Read Disturbance Threshold of Real DRAM Chips 🔗 ETH Zurich, Rutgers University Performance Analysis of Edge and In-Sensor AI Processors: A Comparative Review 🔗 Univ... » read more

Challenges In Scaling Chips To 2nm And Below


Key Takeaways Scaling to 2nm and below continues due to power improvements per watt, but progress is much more challenging and costly. Solutions to problems often create other problems due to less margin for tradeoffs, often requiring larger interposers, more chiplets, and more complex packages. New levels of precision are required throughout the design-through-manufacturing flow, re... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Arm uncorked its first internally developed CPU chip this week, aimed squarely at the agentic AI data center market. Arm CEO Rene Haas (pictured) emphasized the CPU's power efficiency and performance/watt compared to other AI processor architectures. "We are obsessed with efficiency, and if you think about one of the biggest appeals that Arm has had over the years, it is power profile," he ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


War impacts The Iran War's toll on the chip industry is widening. Over 95% of Taiwan's energy is imported, causing the country to secure alternative sources. Korea is also heavily dependent on energy imports from the Middle East. Shortages of key materials are cropping up everywhere. Helium from Qatar, the second largest producer behind the U.S., is constrained by hostilities in the Per... » read more

2D Semiconductors Inch Forward


Key Takeaways: Diffusing oxygen into 2D materials can improve adhesion properties. Channel-last processes can preserve most of the traditional gate-all-around process flow. Dual-gate MoS2 FETs with graphene contacts take advantage of layer transfer methods. Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have come a long way since exfoliated flakes were the state of the art, but the... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Big Deals and Fundings Rapidus secured US$1.7B in a new funding round from the Japanese government and the private sector to ramp 2nm production by next year. Open AI announced a $110B in new funding, with $30B from Nvidia, $30B from Softbank and $50B from Amazon. In a $100B multi-year deal, Meta will power its AI infrastructure with up to 6GW of AMD's GPUs. SambaNova and Intel ar... » read more

Backside Power Delivery Creates Fab Tool, Thermal Dissipation Barriers


Key Takeaways Backside power delivery reduces routing congestion at the most advanced nodes and offers significant performance improvement options. But it also adds a bunch of new challenges involving via alignment and interconnects. Still, leading-edge foundries are making progress, and all of them plan to offer BPDNs at 2nm and below. Backside power delivery networks deliv... » read more

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