Startup Funding: Q1 2026


The new year started off with a bang for private semiconductor companies, with 18 garnering mega funding rounds exceeding $100 million, and two, Rapidus and Cerebras, reaching the $1 billion mark. Predictably, the vast majority of those are either designing chips primarily for AI inference workloads or attempting to overcome bandwidth limitations by improving interconnects from the chip level t... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The IEEE ISSCC conference was held this week in San Francisco. Among the highlights: IBM detailed an AI accelerator based on its new inferencing dataflow architecture. CEA-Leti presented a chip-scale, ultra-fast, battery-operated EPR spectrometer. QuTech introduced a cryo-CMOS SoC with NV centers in diamond. UTokyo showed its low-jitter PLL architecture for beyond 5G/6G. Imec d... » read more

Will New Processor Architectures Raise Energy Efficiency?


Data centers continue to heat up as new processors consume more energy than ever before. Cooling is the primary weapon against the heat these processors generate, but it won’t be able to keep up forever with traditional processor architectures. New ones may be necessary. There are opportunities today to make well-known architectures more energy-efficient, but the number of options for subs... » 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

Startup Funding: March 2024


The challenge of moving data from place to place is increasingly a key concern for chip and system designers, and investors are taking note. Numerous startups developing interconnect technologies received significant backing in March, with approaches spanning chiplet-enabling PHYs, photonic fabrics for disaggregated compute and memory, and telecom transceiver modules. Several new startups la... » read more