Chip Industry Week in Review


Global The U.S. created a licensing path for Nvidia H200 shipments in January and has since approved sales to 10 Chinese companies, but so far no shipments have been confirmed, reports Reuters. With a looming end-of-year expiration, SIA, SEMI, and other business groups are urging Congress to extend the US semiconductor tax credit and expand it to cover semiconductor design and other act... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Manufacturing ASE and WUS are jointly building a ~$1.1B advanced packaging hub in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, for fan-out chip-on-substrate (FOCoS) and flip-chip ball grid array (FC BGA) technologies. The new site is expected to be completed by September 2029. SpaceX filed documents for a “Terafab” semiconductor manufacturing and computing facility at Gibbons Creek Reservoir in Texas, with a... » read more

Humanoid Touch And Voice Are Improving Rapidly


Key Takeaways Humanoid robots are rapidly expanding beyond factories and logistics toward broader, general-purpose roles (including in-home assistance), driven by advances in AI and sensing. Compared with vision and language, touch (haptics) and hearing/voice in real environments remain the hardest — and most commercially important — sensing challenges, requiring fast sensor fusio... » read more

GPU Power Prediction Tool for AI Workloads (MIT, IBM)


A new technical paper, "EnergAIzer: Fast and Accurate GPU Power Estimation Framework for AI Workloads," was published by researchers at MIT and IBM Research. Abstract "As AI workloads drive increases in datacenter power consumption, accurate GPU power estimation is critical for proactive power management. However, existing power models face a scalability bottleneck not in the modeling tec... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Advanced nodes and capacity The US Commerce Dept. told IC equipment makers to stop shipments to Hua Hong Group, China's No. 2 chipmaker, in order to protect America's lead, according to Reuters. Global AI competition is causing wafer and packaging shortages, but capacity increases are expected to come online later this year and in 2027 to ease the crunch, according to TrendForce. Leadi... » read more

Foundry Capacity Is Limiting Who Competes At Leading Edge Nodes


Key Takeaways: Leading-edge node access is increasingly reserved for hyperscalers, squeezing smaller chip developers. Chiplets and advanced packaging offer a path forward, but raise cost, complexity, and risk — especially for smaller teams. Chip architecture is now driven as much by capacity, yield, and economics as by technical goals. The benefits of device scaling are sl... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Deals Marvell acquired Polariton Technologies, a Swiss developer of plasmonics-based silicon photonics devices. Onto Innovation is partnering with Rigaku, combining Onto’s analysis software with Rigaku’s CD-SAXS platform for advanced semiconductor process control. Onto also agreed to acquire a 27% stake in Rigaku for about $710M. Tesla plans to use Intel’s 14A process for its 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

AI Growing Impact On Chip Design And EDA Tools


Key Takeaways Many workflows in the data center are customer-specific, which is part of the reason there is so much interest in agentic AI-enabled tools. Large systems companies are pressing EDA vendors for performance improvements to keep pace with their AI workflows. The makeup of design teams is changing as AI infiltrates more of the chip design process. Experts at the Ta... » 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

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