Chip Industry Week in Review


Qualcomm announced plans to buy Alphawave Semi for ~$2.4 billion in a deal expected to close in Q1 2026. Qualcomm plans to leverage Alphawave Semi's connectivity products, including chiplets, to develop high-performance, low-power solutions for AI inferencing and customized CPUs in data centers. Qualcomm's traditional targets were mobile phones and edge computing. [Updated 6/9.] Global semic... » read more

Interconnects: Criteria For Alternative Metal Benchmarking And Selection (Imec, KU Leuven)


A technical paper titled “Selecting Alternative Metals for Advanced Interconnects” was published by researchers at imec and KU Leuven. Abstract “Today, interconnect resistance and reliability are key limiters for the performance of advanced CMOS circuits. As transistor scaling is slowing, interconnect scaling has become the main driver for circuit miniaturization, and interconnect lim... » read more