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


Microsoft, OpenAI, and NVIDIA warned about power swings and physical damage to power grids increasing from AI training workloads and jointly proposed a multi-pronged approach to stabilize power in AI training data centers. Meanwhile, Anthropic issued a warning about the weaponization of agentic AI in a new 25-page Threat Intelligence report. Key concerns involve the evolution in AI-assisted ... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The U.S. government announced new import tariff actions and deals this week, including: The EU: 15% tariff on most goods including semiconductors. According to the EU's president, the action excludes semiconductor equipment. Copper: 50% tariff on all imports of semi-finished copper products and intensive copper derivative products, effective Aug. 1, but raw input material is excluded. ... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


AI featured big at this week's Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco. Dozens of companies featured AI-related tools (see product section below), as well as significant improvements to existing tools and some entirely new approaches for designing chips. Among the highlights: Siemens unveiled an AI-enhanced toolset for the EDA design flow that enables customers to integrate the... » read more

Mixed Messages Complicate Mixed-Signal


Several years ago, analog and mixed signal (AMS) content hit a wall. Its contribution to first-time chip failure doubled, and there is no evidence that anything has improved dramatically since then. Some see that the problem is likely to get worse due to issues associated with advanced nodes, while others see hope for improvement coming from AI or chiplets. Fig. 1: Cause of ASIC respins. S... » read more

Development Flows For Chiplets


Chiplets offer a huge leap in semiconductor functionality and productivity, just like soft IP did 40 years ago, but a lot has to come together before that becomes reality. It takes an ecosystem, which is currently very rudimentary. Today, many companies have hit the reticle limit and are forced to move to multi-die solutions, but that does not create a plug-and-play chiplet market. These ear... » read more

3D-IC Ecosystem Starts To Take Form


The adoption of chiplets is inevitable, but exactly when a mass migration toward this design approach will begin is yet to be determined. Nevertheless, some of the biggest technological and business-related barriers are being addressed. And while a chiplet-based design remains beyond the economic reach of many companies today, that is starting to change. Early signs of an emerging ecosystem ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Check out our new Inside Chips podcast. President Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs were announced this week. The executive order stated that semiconductors and copper imports are not directly subject to the reciprocal tariff, although the exemption may be short-lived. Semiconductor equipment and tools were not mentioned, leaving the industry searching for clarification. Regardless, hig... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


McKinsey issued a new report on the state of the chemical supply chain for semiconductors in the U.S., citing potential shortages of high-purity materials such as tungsten, aluminum and copper, lack of access to CMP slurries and photoresists for EUV, and rising competition for high-k precursors that can fetch higher prices outside of the U.S. CSIS weighed in on the U.S. goverment's recent ... » read more

3D-IC For The Masses


The concepts of 3D-IC and chiplets have the whole industry excited. It potentially marks the next stage in the evolution of the IP industry, but so far, technical difficulties and cost have curtailed its usage to just a handful of companies. Even within those, they do not appear to be seeing benefits from heterogeneous integration or reuse. Attempts to make this happen are not new. "A decade... » read more

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