Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 27 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

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

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 13 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

The Chinese Academy of Sciences unveiled a fully automated processor chip design system, claiming the potential to accelerate semiconductor development and replace human programmers. Micron Technology plans to expand its U.S. investments to approximately $150 billion in domestic memory manufacturing and $50 billion in R&D, which is $30 billion higher than previously reported. AMD laun... » read more

Multi-Die Assemblies Complicate Parasitic Extraction

By Ann Mutschler - 12 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

The shift from planar designs to multi-die assemblies with complex interconnects is transforming what had become almost an afterthought in the design process into a first-order challenge. Parasitics include things like inductance, capacitance, and resistance, which have become more problematic at advanced nodes due to increasing logic density, thinner interconnects and insulators, and a spik... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 06 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

Qualcomm announced plans to buy Alphawave Semi for ~$2.4 billion in a deal expected to close in Q1 2026. Qualcomm plans to leverage Alphawave Semi's connectivity products, including chiplets, to develop high-performance, low-power solutions for AI inferencing and customized CPUs in data centers. Qualcomm's traditional targets were mobile phones and edge computing. [Updated 6/9.] Global semic... » read more

Mobile Chip Challenges In The AI Era

By Liz Allan - 05 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

Leading smart phone vendors are struggling to keep pace with the rising compute and power demands of localized generative AI, standard phone functions, and the need to move more data back and forth between handsets and the cloud. In addition to edge functions, such as facial recognition and other on-device apps, phones must accommodate a continuous stream of new communications protocols, and... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 30 May, 2025 - Comments: 1

The U.S. Commerce Department is tightening controls on EDA software sold to China by imposing additional license requirements. EDA companies are assessing the impact. Details on how broad the restrictions will be are still pending. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will require Synopsys and Ansys to divest key software assets — including optical, photonic, and RTL power analysis tool... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 16 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Check out the Inside Chips podcast for our behind-the-scenes analysis. Newly proposed U.S. legislation called the Chip Security Act would use location verification tracking as a tool to help combat chip smuggling. This follows a report by the Economist that showed Taiwan exports of advanced chips to Malaysia in the first quarter has nearly reached 2024 totals, heightening concerns that China... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 09 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Check out the Inside Chips podcast for our behind-the-scenes analysis. The U.S. government is rescinding a Biden-era AI export rule that would have imposed complex restrictions on how U.S. chip and AI technology is sold abroad, a move welcomed by companies like Nvidia, reports Bloomberg. While new, simpler guidelines are expected in the coming months, the decision introduces short-term uncer... » read more

Radiation, Temperature, Power Challenges For Chips In Space

By Liz Allan - 07 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Mission-critical hardware used in space is not supposed to fail at all, because lives may be lost in addition to resources, availability, performance, and budgets. For space applications, failure can occur due to a range of factors, including the weather on the day of launch, human error, environmental conditions, unexpected or unknown hazards and degradation of parts to chemical factors, aging... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review

By The SE Staff - 02 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

Check out the Inside Chips podcast for our behind-the-scenes analysis of changes at Intel Foundry. Intel rolled out its updated process technology roadmap this week, along with early process design kit (PDK) for its 14A gate-all-around process technology. That node will utilize high-NA EUV, and include direct contact power delivery, the second generation of its backside power delivery techno... » read more

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