Chip Industry Week In Review


Deals: NVIDIA inked a $20B non-exclusive licensing deal with Groq for its inference technology. The startup's founder, Jonathan Ross, and some other employees will join NVIDIA to assist in scaling and advancing the technology. The non-exclusive licensing deal, versus an outright purchase, is a tool other companies have used to avoid antitrust regulation. Samsung Ventures made a strategic inv... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Dec. 8


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=499 /] Find more semiconductor research papers here and in the most recent Chip Industry Week in Review.   » read more

DeepSeek’s New AI Models: V3.2 and V3.2-Speciale


DeepSeek published two new AI models: V3.2: Pushing the Frontier Of Open LLMs. The company claims the model "performs comparably to GPT-5." and V3.2-Speciale. DeepSeek claims the model "surpasses GPT-5 and exhibits reasoning proficiency on par with Gemini-3.0-Pro." Find the technical paper here and here.  "DeepSeek-V3.2 is our first model to integrate thinking directly into tool-us... » read more

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

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

Hardware-Oriented Analysis of Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA) in DeepSeek-V3 (KU Leuven)


A new technical paper titled "Hardware-Centric Analysis of DeepSeek's Multi-Head Latent Attention" was published by researchers at KU Leuven. Abstract "Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA), introduced in DeepSeek-V2, improves the efficiency of large language models by projecting query, key, and value tensors into a compact latent space. This architectural change reduces the KV-cache size and s... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Feb. 25


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=408 /] Find all technical papers here. » read more

HW-Aligned Sparse Attention Architecture For Efficient Long-Context Modeling (DeepSeek et al.)


A new technical paper titled "Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention" was published by DeepSeek, Peking University and University of Washington. Abstract "Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, yet the high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. Sparse attention... » read more

Vision Language Models Come Rushing In


Just when you thought the pace of change of AI models couldn’t get any faster, it accelerates yet again. In the popular news media, the introduction of DeepSeek in January 2025 created a moment that captured headlines in every newspaper and website heralding comparisons to the Sputnik moment of 1957. But rapid change is also happening in many quarters that are hidden from view of the Chat-App... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


The chip industry is well on its way to hit $1 trillion in revenue by the end of its decade. Several analyst firms released 2024 annual results and 2025 predictions: Worldwide semiconductor revenue reached $626 billion in 2024, an 18% increase versus 2023, according to preliminary Gartner report. Memory revenue grew about 70%  2024 versus 2023. The firm forecasts that HBM will make up 19%... » read more

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