Startup Funding: Q1 2026


The new year started off with a bang for private semiconductor companies, with 18 garnering mega funding rounds exceeding $100 million, and two, Rapidus and Cerebras, reaching the $1 billion mark. Predictably, the vast majority of those are either designing chips primarily for AI inference workloads or attempting to overcome bandwidth limitations by improving interconnects from the chip level t... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Disruptions caused by the Iran conflict have taken about one third of the global helium supply off the market, an essential gas for semiconductor manufacturing, reports the World Economic Forum. Other potential impacts for the chip industry include bromine and other chemical shortages, logistical disruptions, and higher energy prices incurred by fabs in Asia. Top Deals IBM and Lam R... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Think tank IAPS' report on AI integrity attacks contends that advanced AI systems must be protected from hidden tampering, backdoors, or unauthorized changes that could alter their behavior or outputs, especially when AI adoption is scaling rapidly, with over 60% of the federal workforce now using AI every day. Geopolitics The U.S. government has drafted new export rules that may give W... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Intel hired ex-Qualcomm GPU guru Eric Demers for the company's high-performance GPU push, setting the stage for a three-way battle with Nvidia and AMD. The key targets for Intel and AMD will be better power efficiency and a programming model that rivals CUDA, but don't expect Nvidia to stand still. Acquisitions Texas Instruments plans to acquire Silicon Labs for ~$7.5B cash to enhance i... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


TSMC is expected to reduce its Fab 14 mature-node capacity by 15% to 20% to free up resources for its advanced packaging technologies, reports Counterpoint. The foundry will likely rely on its VIS affiliate site in Singapore (operational in late 2026) and other overseas fabs to ensure continued supply for older nodes. Memory The U.S. threatened 100% tariffs on South Korean memory compan... » read more

Startup Funding: Q4 2025


The promise of AI dominated the last quarter of 2025. Investors were eager to claim stakes in both brand-new startups and more established companies developing AI-specific hardware, primarily for data centers, with over $1 billion alone flowing into the sector. The largest round of the quarter went to a new entrant aiming to fundamentally change how AI compute is performed, while two in-memory ... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


SIA's latest monthly global semiconductor sales report reflects a ~30% YOY increase, hitting a record $75.3B in November 2025. Asia Pacific had a notable 66% increase. Cadence launched its Chiplet Spec-to-Packaged Parts ecosystem to accelerate time to market for chiplet development for physical AI, data centers, and HPC applications. Initial IP partners joining Cadence include Arm, Arteris, ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Deals: NVIDIA inked a $20B non-exclusive licensing deal with Groq for its inference technology. The startup's founder, Jonathan Ross, and some other employees will join NVIDIA to assist in scaling and advancing the technology. The non-exclusive licensing deal, versus an outright purchase, is a tool other companies have used to avoid antitrust regulation. Samsung Ventures made a strategic inv... » read more

Scalable End-To-End Test Solutions For Today’s Complex SoCs


By Srikanth Venkat Raman and Sri Ganta Today’s highly complex and large system on chip (SoC) devices and systems present many challenges to be addressed from manufacturing tests to the field while meeting stringent requirements for test costs, test quality, yield, debug, and turn-around-times. Scalable and efficient end-to-end test solutions that scale to large and complex SoC design cores... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


SK hynix is ramping HBM manufacturing capacity to meet explosive demand for AI data centers. The company will launch 16-stack HBM4 next year, and up to 12-stack HBM4E. HBM5 and HBM5E will be introduced between 2029 and 2031, reports Business Korea. China will not have access to NVIDIA’s most advanced chips, President Trump told 60 Minutes. The Dutch economy minister said Nexperia's chip... » read more

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