Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 03 Jul, 2025 - Comments: 0

[Editor's Note: Early edition due to the U.S. July 4th holiday.] The U.S. government lifted export restrictions that barred Synopsys, Siemens EDA, and Cadence from selling EDA tools to China. In a statement, Synopsys said it received a letter from the U.S. Commerce Department immediately rescinding those restrictions. Siemens issued a similar statement. Which tools or hardware accelerated t... » read more

Novel Assembly Approaches For 3D Device Stacks

By Laura Peters - 30 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

The next big leap in semiconductor packaging will require a slew of new technologies, processes, and materials, but collectively they will enable orders of magnitude improvement in performance that will be essential for the AI age. Not all of these issues are fully solved but the recent Electronic Components Technology Conference (ECTC) provided a glimpse into the huge leaps in progress that... » read more

TSMC: King Of Data Center AI

By Geoff Tate - 16 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

Large language models (LLMs like ChatGPT) are driving the rapid expansion of data center AI capacity and performance. More capable LLM models drive demand and need more compute. AI data centers require GPUs/AI Accelerators, switches, CPUs, storage and DRAM. About half of semiconductors are consumed by AI data centers now. This percentage will be much higher by 2030. TSMC has essentially 1... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 13 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

The Chinese Academy of Sciences unveiled a fully automated processor chip design system, claiming the potential to accelerate semiconductor development and replace human programmers. Micron Technology plans to expand its U.S. investments to approximately $150 billion in domestic memory manufacturing and $50 billion in R&D, which is $30 billion higher than previously reported. AMD laun... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 06 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

Qualcomm announced plans to buy Alphawave Semi for ~$2.4 billion in a deal expected to close in Q1 2026. Qualcomm plans to leverage Alphawave Semi's connectivity products, including chiplets, to develop high-performance, low-power solutions for AI inferencing and customized CPUs in data centers. Qualcomm's traditional targets were mobile phones and edge computing. [Updated 6/9.] Global semic... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 30 May, 2025 - Comments: 1

The U.S. Commerce Department is tightening controls on EDA software sold to China by imposing additional license requirements. EDA companies are assessing the impact. Details on how broad the restrictions will be are still pending. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will require Synopsys and Ansys to divest key software assets — including optical, photonic, and RTL power analysis tool... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 23 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Podcast: imec's roadmap and a one-on-one interview with the European research house's chief strategy officer. China's Xiaomi debuted an in-house-designed 10-core mobile SoC built on a 3nm process. The company did not identify the foundry. It also announced plans to invest 50 billion yuan (~$7B) over the next decade to develop high-end smartphone chips, as part of a 200 billion yuan (~$28B) c... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 16 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Check out the Inside Chips podcast for our behind-the-scenes analysis. Newly proposed U.S. legislation called the Chip Security Act would use location verification tracking as a tool to help combat chip smuggling. This follows a report by the Economist that showed Taiwan exports of advanced chips to Malaysia in the first quarter has nearly reached 2024 totals, heightening concerns that China... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 25 Apr, 2025 - Comments: 0

To listen to the podcast version, click here. TSMC unveiled an unusually detailed roadmap at this week's North America Technology Symposium, including future architectures for 3D-ICs for high-performance computing and small, extremely low-power chips for AR/VR glasses, and two implementations of system-on-wafer. Fig. 1: TSMC's future packaging and stacking roadmap. Source: TSMC The ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review

By The SE Staff - 18 Apr, 2025 - Comments: 0

[Podcast version is here.] TSMC said it will produce 30% of its leading-edge chips in Arizona when all six of its fabs are operational, a total investment of $165 billion, Axios reported. In its latest SEC filing, the foundry said it continues to add capacity in Taiwan, Arizona, Japan, and Germany. The Trump administration launched a Section 232 investigation into semiconductors and relat... » read more

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