Chip Industry Week In Review


Micron The memory maker rolled out a slew of announcements this week, including: Raised its planned U.S. investment to more than $250B through 2035, an incremental $50B above what was announced last June, with an ultimate goal of producing 40% of its DRAM in the U.S.; Planned new investments of $3B for U.S. IC supply-chain investments, including $500M in financing for GlobalWafers’ 3... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: July 8


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: Technical Paper Research Organizations Effect of Exchange-Correlation Functionals on Schottky Barriers at Si/Metal Interfaces NIST, University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University AgRefactor: Self-Evolving Agentic Workflow for HLS Compatibility and Performance Carnegie Mellon University, UCLA ... » read more

LLM Agents To Refactor Software For High Level Synthesis (Carnegie Mellon, UCLA)


Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and UCLA published a technical paper titled “AgRefactor: Self-Evolving Agentic Workflow for HLS Compatibility and Performance.” The paper introduces an “LLM-based multi-agent workflow  for refactoring software into HLS-compatible programs" and reports a 6.51× geometric mean speedup over a state-of-the-art pragma tuning tool. Find the tec... » read more

Research Bits: June 30


Monolithic 3D integration Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed a low-temperature process for monolithic 3D integration using standard single-crystalline silicon. “Generally, the industry accepts that once the first layer of circuits is complete, the thermal budget limit for any additional layers is 400 degrees Celsius,” said Qing Cao, a materials scienc... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Deals of the week: Arteris announced plans to acquire cybersecurity provider Cycuity. “Expanding our technology portfolio to include Cycuity’s hardware security assurance products will enable our customers to achieve secure on-chip data movement,” said Charlie Janac, chairman and CEO of Arteris. Qualcomm acquired Ventana Micro Systems, a maker of RISC-V data center-class CPU IP. ... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit kicked off this week in San Jose, dominated by open standards, massive scaling of AI infrastructure, chiplet architectures, and energy-efficiency. Among the highlights: An initiative to standardize data center infrastructure and advance Ethernet for AI. New contributions to OCP's Open Chiplet Economy ecosystem, including Arm's new Foundation Chiplet... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Cadence plans to buy Hexagon AB's design and engineering business to accelerate expansion in physical AI and system design and analysis. Cadence will pay ~US$3.1 billion in cash and issue stock, with the deal expected to close in early 2026. PWC issued a 104-page in-depth analysis of semiconductor technology and markets, highlighting a broad swath of changes: $1T in annual revenue by 2030, ... » 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 Week in Review


The U.S. government announced new import tariff actions and deals this week, including: The EU: 15% tariff on most goods including semiconductors. According to the EU's president, the action excludes semiconductor equipment. Copper: 50% tariff on all imports of semi-finished copper products and intensive copper derivative products, effective Aug. 1, but raw input material is excluded. ... » 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

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