Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 13 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

The Chinese Academy of Sciences unveiled a fully automated processor chip design system, claiming the potential to accelerate semiconductor development and replace human programmers. Micron Technology plans to expand its U.S. investments to approximately $150 billion in domestic memory manufacturing and $50 billion in R&D, which is $30 billion higher than previously reported. AMD laun... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 06 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

Qualcomm announced plans to buy Alphawave Semi for ~$2.4 billion in a deal expected to close in Q1 2026. Qualcomm plans to leverage Alphawave Semi's connectivity products, including chiplets, to develop high-performance, low-power solutions for AI inferencing and customized CPUs in data centers. Qualcomm's traditional targets were mobile phones and edge computing. [Updated 6/9.] Global semic... » read more

Photomask Japan 2025: A Strong Signal For The Future Of Our Industry

By Leo Pang - 02 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

Photomask Japan (PMJ) 2025 was, without a doubt, the most exciting edition I’ve attended in recent years. From a surge in attendance to a packed agenda full of technical depth and forward-looking insights, this year’s event reflected the growing momentum and innovation across the photomask and eBeam ecosystem. Let’s start with the numbers—624 attendees. That’s a significant jump fr... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 23 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Podcast: imec's roadmap and a one-on-one interview with the European research house's chief strategy officer. China's Xiaomi debuted an in-house-designed 10-core mobile SoC built on a 3nm process. The company did not identify the foundry. It also announced plans to invest 50 billion yuan (~$7B) over the next decade to develop high-end smartphone chips, as part of a 200 billion yuan (~$28B) c... » read more

Mask Complexity, Cost, And Change

By Gregory Haley - 22 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Experts at the Table: As leading-edge lithography nodes push further into EUV and beyond, mask-making has become one of the most critical and costly aspects of semiconductor manufacturing. At the same time, non-EUV applications are stretching the lifetime of older tools and processes, challenging the industry to find new solutions for both ends of the spectrum. Semiconductor Engineering sat dow... » read more

Three-Way Race To 3D-ICs

By Ed Sperling - 05 May, 2025 - Comments: 1

Intel Foundry, TSMC, and Samsung Foundry are scrambling to deliver all the foundational components of full 3D-ICs, which collectively will deliver orders of magnitude improvements in performance with minimal power sometime within the next few years. Much attention has been focused on process node advances, but a successful 3D-IC implementation is much more complex and comprehensive than just... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review

By The SE Staff - 21 Mar, 2025 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor industry energy consumption grew 125% between 2015 and 2023, while direct greenhouse gas emissions rose 23% in the same period, according to the Europe think tank Interface, which analyzed corporate social responsibility reports from 28 global chip manufacturers. CSIS' new report "Understanding U.S. Allies’ Current Legal Authority to Implement AI and Semiconductor Export Cont... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review

By The SE Staff - 28 Feb, 2025 - Comments: 0

Intel said its new fab in Licking County, Ohio will be delayed due to financial struggles and a need to align chip production with market demand, reported the Columbus Dispatch. Construction is now estimated to be completed in 2030, with operations to start in 2030 or 2031. The company said it already has invested $3.7 billion locally. Apple plans to invest more than $500 billion in the U.S... » read more

Memory Wall Problem Grows With LLMs

By Katherine Derbyshire - 20 Feb, 2025 - Comments: 0

The growing imbalance between the amount of data that needs to be processed to train large language models (LLMs) and the inability to move that data back and forth fast enough between memories and processors has set off a massive global search for a better and more energy- and cost-efficient solution. Much of this is evident in the numbers. The GPU market is forecast to reach $190 billion in ... » read more

EUV’s Future Looks Even Brighter

By Gregory Haley - 20 Feb, 2025 - Comments: 1

The rapidly increasing demand for advanced-node chips to support everything-AI is putting pressure on the industry's ability to meet demand. The need for cutting-edge semiconductors is accelerating in applications ranging from hyperscale data centers powering large language models to edge AI in smartphones, IoT devices, and autonomous systems. But manufacturing those chips relies heavily on ... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

EUV’s Future Looks Even Brighter

Demand for AI chips is growing exponentially, but costs and complexity limit the technology to a handful of companies. That could soon change.

by Gregory Haley

Speeding Up Computational Lithography With The Power And Parallelism Of GPUs

A new lithography library brings mask optimization operations to GPUs.

by Thuc Dam

Startup Funding: Q1 2025

AI chips and data center communications see big funding; 75 startups raise $2 billion.

by Jesse Allen

Advanced Packaging Fundamentals for Semiconductor Engineers

New SE eBook examines the next phase of semiconductor design, testing, and manufacturing.

by Bryon Moyer