Chip Industry Week in Review


SEMICON West was held in Phoenix this week, with presentations covering heterogeneous integration, AI, quantum, supply chain resilience, and more. Amid the buzz of the conference, some key manufacturing and test announcements were made this week: The strategic importance of the Phoenix area hub was highlighted. Amkor Technology broke ground this week on its advanced packaging and test camp... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer warned Southeast Asian semiconductor manufacturers that they must shift production to the U.S. or face new punitive tariffs, reports the South China Morning Post. President Trump previously floated a 100% tariff on imported chips. Malaysia and other regional economies are offering large concessions and promises of U.S. goods purchases in hopes of securin... » 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

Chip Industry Week in Review


Apple plans to increase its U.S. investment by an additional $100 billion over four years, which includes the launch of an advanced manufacturing supply chain program, spurring a number of related chip industry announcements, including: Apple will invest in Amkor's new packaging and test facility in Arizona as its first and largest customer, and Amkor will package and test Apple silicon pr... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Texas Instruments will invest more than $60 billion to build and expand seven semiconductor fabs in Texas and Utah, supporting more than 60,000 U.S. jobs. Chinese automakers — including SAIC Motor, Changan, Great Wall Motor, BYD, Li Auto and Geely — are aiming to launch new models with 100% homemade chips, some as early as 2026, reports Nikkei Asia. Marvell introduced 2nm custom SRAM ... » read more

High-Quality Data Needed To Better Utilize Fab Data Streams


Fab operations have wrestled with big data management issues for decades. Standards help, but only if sufficient attention to detail is taken during collection. Semiconductor wafer manufacturing represents one of the most complex manufacturing processes in the world. With each generation of process improvement comes more sophisticated fab equipment, new process recipes, and exponential incre... » read more

Research Bits: June 9


InGaOx GAA transistor Researchers from the University of Tokyo created a gate-all-around transistor made from gallium-doped indium oxide (InGaOx). Doping indium oxide with gallium suppressed oxygen vacancies, improving transistor reliability. "We wanted our crystalline oxide transistor to feature a 'gate-all-around' structure, whereby the gate, which turns the current on or off, surrounds t... » read more

Photomask Japan 2025: A Strong Signal For The Future Of Our Industry


Photomask Japan (PMJ) 2025 was, without a doubt, the most exciting edition I’ve attended in recent years. From a surge in attendance to a packed agenda full of technical depth and forward-looking insights, this year’s event reflected the growing momentum and innovation across the photomask and eBeam ecosystem. Let’s start with the numbers—624 attendees. That’s a significant jump fr... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


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

E-Beam Inspection Proves Essential For Advanced Nodes


Electron-beam inspection is proving to be indispensable for finding critical defects at sub-5nm dimensions. The challenge now is how to speed up the process to make it economically palatable to fabs. E-beam inspection's notorious sensitivity-throughput tradeoff has made comprehensive defect coverage with e-beam at these advanced nodes especially problematic. For Intel’s 18A logic node (~1.... » read more

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