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


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


The IEEE ISSCC conference was held this week in San Francisco. Among the highlights: IBM detailed an AI accelerator based on its new inferencing dataflow architecture. CEA-Leti presented a chip-scale, ultra-fast, battery-operated EPR spectrometer. QuTech introduced a cryo-CMOS SoC with NV centers in diamond. UTokyo showed its low-jitter PLL architecture for beyond 5G/6G. Imec d... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Geopolitics U.S. lawmakers are urging tighter export controls on advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME) to China, warning existing loopholes threaten national security. "China is working to build domestic SME by exploiting access to U.S. and allied subcomponents required to produce tools," states the letter, which also says better coordination with allies is essential. The U.S.... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Big deals and fundings Teradyne and MultiLane are forming a joint venture, MultiLane Test Products (MLTP), to accelerate the development of test solutions for high speed data connections.  Teradyne will be the majority owner. Ricursive Intelligence raised $300M Series A for AI-driven IC design. IonQ plans to acquire SkyWater for ~$1.8B, creating a "vertically integrated full-stack q... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Breaking news: Nvidia and Synopsys announced a multi-faceted, multi-year deal that includes everything from digital twins to CUDA programming, engineering, and marketing collaboration, and Nvidia's $2B purchase of Synopsys stock. [Updated 12/1] Memory news: Micron is building a $9.6B HBM facility in the city of Higashi-Hiroshima Japan, reports Nikkei. China's ChangXin Memory Technol... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Nov. 26


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=494 /] Find more semiconductor research papers here. » read more

A Decade Of Architectural RowHammer Defense Solutions (Meta, SNU, UIUC)


A new technical paper titled "SoK: Systematizing a Decade of Architectural RowHammer Defenses Through the Lens of Streaming Algorithms" was published by researchers at Meta, Seoul National University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Abstract: "A decade after its academic introduction, RowHammer (RH) remains a moving target that continues to challenge both the industry and aca... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Samsung reportedly is hiking memory chip prices by 30% to 60% due to high demand from AI data centers and constrained supplies. Those shortages are causing ripples elsewhere. SMIC, China's largest foundry, said its customers are holding back orders for other types of semiconductor due to concerns about memory supplies. Meanwhile, interest in photonics and power semiconductors is picking up, ... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit kicked off this week in San Jose, dominated by open standards, massive scaling of AI infrastructure, chiplet architectures, and energy-efficiency. Among the highlights: An initiative to standardize data center infrastructure and advance Ethernet for AI. New contributions to OCP's Open Chiplet Economy ecosystem, including Arm's new Foundation Chiplet... » read more

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