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

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


Don't have time to read this? Check out Semiconductor Engineering's Inside Chips podcast.  The U.S. Department of Commerce is investigating TSMC for potential export control violations involving Huawei chips, reports Reuters. The probe follows TechInsights' teardown of a Huawei AI accelerator chip last year. The foundry, meanwhile, maintains it has not shipped any chips to Huawei since 2020... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Oct. 29


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=375 /] More Reading Chip Industry Week In Review Intel’s EU court win; high-NA benchmarks and new maskless litho; SiC down, GaN up; Natcast’s plan; Xiaomi’s 3nm chip; semi tax credit rules; RISC-V; lithium mine; AI-edge expansion. Technical Paper Library home » read more

Characterizing Defects Inside Hexagonal Boron Nitride (KAIST, NYU, et al.)


A new technical paper titled "Characterizing Defects Inside Hexagonal Boron Nitride Using Random Telegraph Signals in van der Waals 2D Transistors" was published by researchers at KAIST, NYU, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and National Institute for Materials Science. Abstract: "Single-crystal hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is used extensively in many two-dimensional electronic and quantu... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Synopsys agreed to sell its Optical Solutions Group to Keysight for an undisclosed amount, in a deal deemed necessary for Synopsys to win regulatory approval for its planned acquisition of Ansys. The sale to Keysight is contingent on the Synopsys-Ansys deal going through. Meanwhile, Ansys has its own optical business. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) made the first awards for Microelectr... » read more

HW Security Bug Characteristics in Google’s OpenTitan Silicon Root Of Trust Project 


A technical paper titled “An Investigation of Hardware Security Bug Characteristics in Open-Source Projects” was published by researchers at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and University of Calgary. Abstract: "Hardware security is an important concern of system security as vulnerabilities can arise from design errors introduced throughout the development lifecycle. Recent works have pro... » read more

Chip Industry’s Technical Paper Roundup: June 5


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=105 /] More Reading Technical Paper Library home » read more

Issues and Opportunities in Using LLMs for Hardware Design


A technical paper titled "Chip-Chat: Challenges and Opportunities in Conversational Hardware Design" was published by researchers at NYU and University of New South Wales. Abstract "Modern hardware design starts with specifications provided in natural language. These are then translated by hardware engineers into appropriate Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) such as Verilog before syn... » read more

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