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


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


Amkor, TSMC, and Cadence partnered with Tesoro VC, which will serve as the lead operator of a new Global AI + Semiconductor Startup Hub and a Global Design Center in Phoenix, Arizona, aimed at chip innovation, startup growth, and advanced manufacturing. Nvidia will invest $5 billion in Intel common stock at a purchase price of $23.28 per share and the companies will collaborate on AI infrastru... » read more

What Do LLMs Want from Hardware


Figure 1: Noam Shazeer, Google Gemini vice president, presented this in his Hot Chips 2025 talk. Noam Shazeer is Google’s vice president of engineering for Gemini, their LLM competitor to ChatGPT. He talked recently at Hot Chips: “Predictions for the Next Phase of AI." He has worked on LLMs for a decade since inventing the transformer model in 2017. As his slide says, LLMs can take adv... » 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

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: August 19


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=465 /] Find more semiconductor research papers here. » read more

The Severity Of Test Escapes And SDCs Caused By Them (Google)


A new technical paper titled "Silent Data Corruption by 10x Test Escapes Threatens Reliable Computing" was published by Google. Abstract "Too many defective compute chips are escaping existing manufacturing tests -- at least an order of magnitude more than industrial targets across all compute chip types in data centers. Silent data corruptions (SDCs) caused by test escapes, when left unadd... » read more

Physical AI Chip Sales Won’t Rival GenAI Anytime Soon


Fig. 1: When can we send our humanoid to pick up some milk at the store? Source: ChatGPT image There has been a lot of talk about physical AI, much of it very optimistic. Physical AI is happening, but more slowly than many expect. It will not rival GenAI soon. We’ll analyze humanoids, fully autonomous vehicles, then all application-specific robots (ASRs), ending with a rough estimate ... » read more

Data Center CPU Dominance Is Shifting To AMD And Arm


Fig. 1: Created by ChatGPT from a text prompt. The data center processor market has seen two major tectonic shifts in the last decade. It used to be that all data center compute was x86, and well more than 90% of that was Intel. GPUs first appeared in the data center in 2016 (Pascal GPU). Now, the majority of computation is done on GPUs. AMD is looking to pass Intel in x86 share, and... » read more

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