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

Chip Industry Week In Review


China's Hefei Lumiverse Technology reportedly has developed a desktop-sized High Harmonic Generation light source that generates wavelengths as small as 1nm. One customer already has used it to produce 14nm chips, which was the original target node for EUV, according to one report. As a point of comparison, TSMC and Samsung didn't start using EUV until the 7nm node, relying instead on immersion... » read more

Research Bits: Nov. 10


Post-doping plasma for DRAM capacitors Researchers from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), and Seoul National University of Science and Technology developed a post-doping plasma (PDP) process to improve the performance of DRAM capacitors. Aluminum-doped titanium dioxide (Al-doped TiO2) is a promising material fo... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Sept 8


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=471 /] Find more semiconductor research papers here. » read more

Overview of Incorporating LLMs into EDA, With 3 Case Studies (TU Munich et al.)


A new technical paper titled "Large Language Models (LLMs) for Electronic Design Automation (EDA)" was published by researchers at the Technical University of Munich, University of Stuttgart, New York University, and University of Siegen. Abstract "With the growing complexity of modern integrated circuits, hardware engineers are required to devote more effort to the full design-to-manufactu... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Intel reported flat year-over year revenue for Q2, exceeding Wall Street's pessimistic expectations. In a message to employees, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the company will: Cut about 15% of its staff, ending the year with about 75,000 employees, down from a high of nearly 132,000 in 2022; Scrap projects in Poland and Germany, consolidate other sites in central America and Southeast Asia, and s... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Global spending on 300mm fab equipment is expected to reach a record US$400 billion from 2025 to 2027, according to SEMI. Key drivers are the regionalization of semiconductor fabs and the increasing demand for AI chips in data centers and edge devices, with China, South Korea, and Taiwan leading the way. The Biden-Harris Administration launched the National Semiconductor Technology Center’... » read more

Security Technical Paper Roundup: Aug. 27


A number of hardware security-related technical papers were presented at the August 2024 USENIX Security Symposium. The organization provides open access research, and the presentation slides and papers are free to the public. Topics include side-channel attacks and defenses, embedded security, fuzzing, fault injection, logic locking, Rowhammer, and more. Here are some highlights with associate... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


JEDEC and the Open Compute Project rolled out a new set of guidelines for standardizing chiplet characterization details, such as thermal properties, physical and mechanical requirements, and behavior specs. Those details have been a sticking point for commercial chiplets, because without them it's not possible to choose the best chiplet for a particular application or workload. The guidelines ... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Feb. 19


New technical papers added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library this week. [table id=199 /] More ReadingTechnical Paper Library home » read more

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