Chip Industry Week in Review


SK hynix is ramping HBM manufacturing capacity to meet explosive demand for AI data centers. The company will launch 16-stack HBM4 next year, and up to 12-stack HBM4E. HBM5 and HBM5E will be introduced between 2029 and 2031, reports Business Korea. China will not have access to NVIDIA’s most advanced chips, President Trump told 60 Minutes. The Dutch economy minister said Nexperia's chip... » read more

LLMs Add Safety Risks To Physical AI


Humanoid robots with artificial general intelligence are some years from entering our daily life, but application-specific robotics are already here. From Amazon’s fleet of fulfillment center robots to robotic surgical systems in operating rooms, search and rescue robo-dogs, autonomous drones, and last-mile delivery robots, all the way down to the humble Roomba vacuum cleaner, physical AI sys... » read more

Co-Optimizing GPU Architecture And SW To Enhance Edge Inference Performance (NVIDIA)


A new technical paper titled "EdgeReasoning: Characterizing Reasoning LLM Deployment on Edge GPUs" was published by researchers at NVIDIA. Abstract "Edge intelligence paradigm is increasingly demanded by the emerging autonomous systems, such as robotics. Beyond ensuring privacy-preserving operation and resilience in connectivity-limited environments, edge deployment offers significant energ... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


San Francisco-based Substrate raised more than $100 million to build a vertically integrated foundry that uses particle accelerators to produce "the world's brightest beams, enabling a new method of advanced X-ray lithography." The company claims its technology is comparable to ASML's high NA EUV, and notes it can extend well beyond 2nm. ASML has not publicly commented. The Nexperia chip sho... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Retaliations and countermoves leading up to planned trade talks between the U.S. and China led experts to wonder, 'Who's winning?' New activity on this front: China issued questionnaires to some U.S. semiconductor firms as part of an anti-dumping probe, demanding detailed data on sales, profit margins, logistics costs and Chinese customer names for analog chips. The probe appears aimed at ... » read more

Powering Efficiency: AI Transforms IC Manufacturing As ICs Fuel AI


The push to grow today’s $500 billion-plus semiconductor industry to $1 trillion in annual revenue is challenging every aspect of the broader supply chain to embrace AI. Artificial intelligence is transforming the way fabs are architected and run, how devices are manufactured, and how server farms are constructed going forward. At the same time, all of this is being enabled by advancements... » read more

AI Bubble Or Boom?


Are we in an AI bubble? Parallels are being drawn to the dot.com boom/bust of 1999-2000. In the dot.com bust, many high-tech companies valuations soared up 10X, then deflated. The peak P/E ratio for the Nasdaq Composite was 200! Remember Webvan? It went public November 1999 with an $8 billion valuation, then filed for bankruptcy 19 months later. It was much speculation without profits or gro... » 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

Data Centers Boost Voltage For Higher Efficiency


The power architecture used in HPC and AI data centers today is about to undergo a significant change in an effort to boost power efficiency. While voltages at the chip level will remain the same, the voltages leading to those chips will be kept higher for longer distances. This change has broad implications for DC-DC converters. The existing architecture brings AC to each rack, converts it ... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


SEMICON West was held in Phoenix this week, with presentations covering heterogeneous integration, AI, quantum, supply chain resilience, and more. Amid the buzz of the conference, some key manufacturing and test announcements were made this week: The strategic importance of the Phoenix area hub was highlighted. Amkor Technology broke ground this week on its advanced packaging and test camp... » read more

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