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

HBM Shifts Testing Left To Preserve AI Chip Yield


Key Takeaways: A high-yield, known-good stack requires multiple test insertions. Known good stack testing poses challenges for power delivery and thermal management. The shift to HBM4 and HBM5 will increase the pressure for shift-left test flows. Taller high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacks and tighter TSV pitch are impacting AI module yields. The solution is to push test furth... » 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


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

Chiplet Standards Aim For Plug-n-Play


Key Takeaways Die-to-die chiplet standards are only the beginning. Many more standards are necessary for a chiplet marketplace. A number of such standards have either had initial versions released or are in progress. Existing work covers packaging, a system architecture, various design kits, a universal link layer, and updates to BoW. Today’s chiplets exist in silos. In a ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Deals, Funding Intel will join Elon Musk’s Terafab chip manufacturing project alongside Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. Intel described its role as helping refactor silicon fab technology for a project targeting production of 1 TW/year of compute for AI and robotics applications. Intel and Google are expanding a multi-year collaboration on AI and cloud infrastructure, with Intel Xeon processo... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Arm uncorked its first internally developed CPU chip this week, aimed squarely at the agentic AI data center market. Arm CEO Rene Haas (pictured) emphasized the CPU's power efficiency and performance/watt compared to other AI processor architectures. "We are obsessed with efficiency, and if you think about one of the biggest appeals that Arm has had over the years, it is power profile," he ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Big Deals and Fundings Rapidus secured US$1.7B in a new funding round from the Japanese government and the private sector to ramp 2nm production by next year. Open AI announced a $110B in new funding, with $30B from Nvidia, $30B from Softbank and $50B from Amazon. In a $100B multi-year deal, Meta will power its AI infrastructure with up to 6GW of AMD's GPUs. SambaNova and Intel ar... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Deals of the week: Arteris announced plans to acquire cybersecurity provider Cycuity. “Expanding our technology portfolio to include Cycuity’s hardware security assurance products will enable our customers to achieve secure on-chip data movement,” said Charlie Janac, chairman and CEO of Arteris. Qualcomm acquired Ventana Micro Systems, a maker of RISC-V data center-class CPU IP. ... » read more

3DKs: Making Headway On Chiplet Standards


The chiplet model has been proven by the early adopters. Large companies that successfully developed chips at leading nodes have integrated multiple chiplets into systems, where the entire silicon cycle is performed in-house. But the industry’s long-term goal of a free and open chiplet marketplace, in which companies of any size can reap the rewards and economies of scale associated with mult... » read more

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