Chip Industry Week In Review


Computex in Taiwan: Arm and Nvidia introduced an AI PC platform, RTX Spark, with an Arm-based Grace CPU, Blackwell RTX GPU, and unified memory. Cadence announced a fully autonomous virtual agentic AI design engineer, enabling customers to run dynamic simulations in automated workflows. Intel launched Xeon 6+, its first data-center CPU built on Intel Foundry's 18A process. The company... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Deals Marvell acquired Polariton Technologies, a Swiss developer of plasmonics-based silicon photonics devices. Onto Innovation is partnering with Rigaku, combining Onto’s analysis software with Rigaku’s CD-SAXS platform for advanced semiconductor process control. Onto also agreed to acquire a 27% stake in Rigaku for about $710M. Tesla plans to use Intel’s 14A process for its T... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Geopolitics U.S. lawmakers are urging tighter export controls on advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME) to China, warning existing loopholes threaten national security. "China is working to build domestic SME by exploiting access to U.S. and allied subcomponents required to produce tools," states the letter, which also says better coordination with allies is essential. The U.S.... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Intel hired ex-Qualcomm GPU guru Eric Demers for the company's high-performance GPU push, setting the stage for a three-way battle with Nvidia and AMD. The key targets for Intel and AMD will be better power efficiency and a programming model that rivals CUDA, but don't expect Nvidia to stand still. Acquisitions Texas Instruments plans to acquire Silicon Labs for ~$7.5B cash to enhance i... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


TSMC is expected to reduce its Fab 14 mature-node capacity by 15% to 20% to free up resources for its advanced packaging technologies, reports Counterpoint. The foundry will likely rely on its VIS affiliate site in Singapore (operational in late 2026) and other overseas fabs to ensure continued supply for older nodes. Memory The U.S. threatened 100% tariffs on South Korean memory compan... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


China's Hefei Lumiverse Technology reportedly has developed a desktop-sized High Harmonic Generation light source that generates wavelengths as small as 1nm. One customer already has used it to produce 14nm chips, which was the original target node for EUV, according to one report. As a point of comparison, TSMC and Samsung didn't start using EUV until the 7nm node, relying instead on immersion... » read more

Small Vs. Large Language Models


The proliferation of edge AI will require fundamental changes in language models and chip architectures to make inferencing and learning outside of AI data centers a viable option. The initial goal for small language models (SLMs) — roughly 10 billion parameters or less, compared to more than a trillion parameters in the biggest LLMs — was to leverage them exclusively for inferencing. In... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


AI featured big at this week's Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco. Dozens of companies featured AI-related tools (see product section below), as well as significant improvements to existing tools and some entirely new approaches for designing chips. Among the highlights: Siemens unveiled an AI-enhanced toolset for the EDA design flow that enables customers to integrate the... » 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

Building Smarter, Better Fabs


Battling labor shortages, faster ramp rates, and data overload, the process of designing and building greenfield fabs requires a combination of tech tools, failing earlier approaches and superior planning from day one. The complexity and scale of semiconductor fabs is skyrocketing as is the capital cost. Chipmakers are looking to ramp multibillion dollar fabs faster despite the hurdles of la... » read more

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