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


ECTC Panel-level packaging, hybrid bonding, new substrates, and fine-pitch interconnects topped the list of advanced packaging technologies at ECTC this week. Among the announcements: ASE launched an automated 310mm × 310mm panel-level packaging production line. Expected to enter production in the first half of 2027, the line is compatible with FOCoS and FOCoS-Bridge pa... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Advanced nodes and packaging AMD announced more than $10B in Taiwan ecosystem investments to scale advanced packaging manufacturing for AI infrastructure. The effort includes EFB-based 2.5D packaging collaborations with ASE and others. AMD also announced the start of its production ramp of its Venice processors on TSMC's 2nm process. Lam Research established a panel-level packaging cen... » read more

Low-Temp Solders Are Suddenly Critical For Chiplets And Photonics


Key Takeaways: Tin-bismuth-based solders enable reduced warpage and compatibility with silicon photonics and other temperature-sensitive components. A novel soldering process using white light could help prevent cracks in flip-chip BGA package solder balls, while reducing the carbon footprint. Hypoeutectic Sn-Bi based solders prove especially promising as an SAC305 replacement. ... » read more

Scalable Photomask Optimization With Morphological Learning (SUNY Buffalo, VU, IBM)


A new technical paper, "MorphOPC: Advancing Mask Optimization with Multi-scale Hierarchical Morphological Learning," was published by researchers at University at Buffalo, Villanova University, and IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Abstract "As feature sizes shrink to the nanometer scale, accurately transferring circuit patterns from photomasks to silicon wafers becomes increasingly chall... » read more

GPU Power Prediction Tool for AI Workloads (MIT, IBM)


A new technical paper, "EnergAIzer: Fast and Accurate GPU Power Estimation Framework for AI Workloads," was published by researchers at MIT and IBM Research. Abstract "As AI workloads drive increases in datacenter power consumption, accurate GPU power estimation is critical for proactive power management. However, existing power models face a scalability bottleneck not in the modeling tec... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Advanced nodes and capacity The US Commerce Dept. told IC equipment makers to stop shipments to Hua Hong Group, China's No. 2 chipmaker, in order to protect America's lead, according to Reuters. Global AI competition is causing wafer and packaging shortages, but capacity increases are expected to come online later this year and in 2027 to ease the crunch, according to TrendForce. Leadi... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Acquisitions and business pivots Teradyne acquired Israel-based TestInsight, a semiconductor test provider with pattern conversion, validation, and virtual test capabilities. Credo plans to acquire DustPhotonics, a developer of silicon photonics PICs for optical transceivers. Molex plans to acquire Teramount, a provider of detachable, passive-alignment fiber-to-chip connectivity solu... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Apr. 14


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: Technical Paper Research Organizations Device/circuit simulations of silicon spin qubits based on a gate-all-around transistor 🔗 Teikyo University, RIKEN Causal AI For AMS Circuit Design: Interpretable Parameter Effects Analysis 🔗 University of Florida Reliability of Wide B... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Deals IBM and Arm are collaborating on a new dual‑architecture hardware aimed at enterprise AI and data-intensive workloads, using virtualization to boost reliability, security, scalability, and software compatibility. The goal, according to an IBM spokesperson, is to deliver side-by-side deployments of S390x-Linux and Arm-Linux virtual machines in a single kernel-based hypervisor. Nv... » read more

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