Chip Industry Week In Review


Dealmaking Amkor inked a 10-year agreement with TSMC to provide advanced packaging and test services in Arizona, tying TSMC’s U.S. fab expansion to domestic OSAT capacity. Trump said in a post that Apple will partner with Intel on chip design and production in the U.S., marking a second reported win for the chipmaker this month. Intel Foundry will also reportedly manufacture 3 million... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: May 26


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: Technical Paper Research Organizations SHIP: SRAM-Based Huge Inference Pipelines for Fast LLM Serving 🔗 Nvidia, Groq Not All Thoughts Need HBM: Semantics-Aware Memory Hierarchy for LLM Reasoning 🔗 USC, University of Wisconsin-Madison Water-based, large-scale transfer of... » read more

Evaluating and Calibrating Performance On RISC-V Vector Processors (KTH, LLNL, BSC)


A new technical paper, "Closer in the Gap: Towards Portable Performance on RISC-V Vector Processors," was published by researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Abstract "The RISC-V Vector Extension~(RVV) is a cornerstone for supporting compute throughout in scientific and machine learning workloads. Yet ... » read more

Research Bits: Jan. 12


Wafer-scale two-photon lithography Researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Stanford University demonstrated a two-photon lithography (TPL) platform for wafer-scale manufacturing. The TPL platform uses large arrays of metalenses to split a femtosecond laser into more than 120,000 coordinated focal spots that write simultaneously across centimeter-scale areas. The a... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Government funding/defunding NIST is terminating funding for the SMART USA Institute, a CHIPS Act research center focused on digital twins, prompting congressional concern that the decision disrupts active awards and weakens U.S. semiconductor R&D commitments. Korea Zinc was awarded $210M in CHIPS Act funding towards a new $6.6B Tennessee advanced smelter and minerals processing facility,... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Major Deals: Taiwan-based UMC is exploring possible collaboration with Polar Semiconductor for high-volume production of 8-inch wafers at Polar’s expanded Minnesota fab, a move that could provide domestic manufacturing capacity for automotive, data center, consumer, aerospace, and defense customers. Marvell will acquire Celestial AI for $3.25B, adding photonic fabric technology for o... » read more

Research Bits: Sept. 23


Opto-electrical excitation of MTJs Researchers at the University of Greifswald, International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, and Aarhus University advanced the use of magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) for neuromorphic computing. The team developed a hybrid opto-electrical excitation scheme that combines electrical currents with short laser p... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Microsoft, OpenAI, and NVIDIA warned about power swings and physical damage to power grids increasing from AI training workloads and jointly proposed a multi-pronged approach to stabilize power in AI training data centers. Meanwhile, Anthropic issued a warning about the weaponization of agentic AI in a new 25-page Threat Intelligence report. Key concerns involve the evolution in AI-assisted ... » 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

Crisis Ahead: Power Consumption In AI Data Centers


AI data centers are consuming energy at roughly four times the rate that more electricity is being added to grids, setting the stage for fundamental shifts in where power is generated, where AI data centers are built, and much more efficient system, chip, and software architectures. The numbers are particularly striking for the United States and China, which are in a race to ramp up AI data ... » read more

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