Chip Industry Week In Review


Micron The memory maker rolled out a slew of announcements this week, including: Raised its planned U.S. investment to more than $250B through 2035, an incremental $50B above what was announced last June, with an ultimate goal of producing 40% of its DRAM in the U.S.; Planned new investments of $3B for U.S. IC supply-chain investments, including $500M in financing for GlobalWafers’ 3... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Around the world South Korea unveiled a sweeping AI and semiconductor investment drive, planning three mega projects that tie semiconductors, physical AI/robotics, and AI data centers into a single industrial plan, with government support for regional chip clusters, packaging capacity, power, water, sites, and workforce development. Among the new investments: Samsung will spend $260B on n... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


IBM unveiled a 7Å transistor architecture that uses staggered nanosheet transistors stacked on a precisely beveled angle, almost like tiles on a roof. That allows more transistors to be crammed into a given area, boosting performance by 50% or power efficiency by up to 70%. Perhaps even more important, IBM claims a 40% improvement in SRAM scaling, which is orders of magnitude faster and lower ... » 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

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

HW-Native, GPU Compiler for Large-scale ML Production Systems (UC San Diego, Meta)


A new technical paper, "TLX: Hardware-Native, Evolvable MIMW GPU Compiler for Large-scale Production Environments," was published by researchers at UC San Diego and Meta. Abstract "Modern GPUs increasingly rely on specialized hardware units and asynchronous coordination mechanisms, so performance depends on orchestrating data movement, tensor-core computation, and synchronization rather t... » 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

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


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

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