Chip Industry Week In Review


Deals, Funding Intel will join Elon Musk’s Terafab chip manufacturing project alongside Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. Intel described its role as helping refactor silicon fab technology for a project targeting production of 1 TW/year of compute for AI and robotics applications. Intel and Google are expanding a multi-year collaboration on AI and cloud infrastructure, with Intel Xeon processo... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Geopolitics Taiwan and the U.S. signed a trade agreement this week, with TSMC and other Taiwanese companies collectively pledging to directly invest at least $250B in investments in advanced semiconductor, energy and AI production and capacity in the U.S.  The agreement also included Taiwan providing another $250B in credit guarantees for additional IC supply chain expansions in the U.S., cap... » read more

FPGAs Find New Workloads In The High-Speed AI Era


FPGAs are finding new applications in the age of artificial intelligence, high-speed wireless communications, medical and life science technology, and in complex chip architectures where they can improve the flow of data. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) enable designers to reprogram or reconfigure digital logic after the chips have been deployed, which is essential in the AI world, wher... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The U.S. is considering annual approvals for Samsung and SK hynix to export chipmaking tools and materials to their factories in China, replacing perpetual waivers granted under the validated end user system, reports Bloomberg. The proposal, presented by the U.S. Commerce Department to South Korean officials, would require the companies to reapply each year for specific quantities of restricted... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Europe's top court ruled in Intel's favor, voiding a $1.1 billion fine imposed by the European Union and dismissing charges of anti-competitive behavior. IBM released yield benchmarks for high-NA EUV, which serve as proof points that the newest advanced litho equipment will enable scaling beyond the 2nm process node. Also on the lithography front, Nikon is developing a maskless digital litho... » 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

Chip Industry Week in Review


The Biden-Harris Administration announced preliminary terms with HP for $50 million in direct funding under the CHIPs and Science Act to support the expansion and modernization of HP’s existing microfluidics and microelectromechanical systems (“MEMS”) facility in Corvallis, Oregon. CHIPS for America launched the CHIPS Metrology Community, a collaborative initiative designed to advance ... » read more

RISC-V Heralds New Era Of Cooperation


RISC-V is paving the way for open source to become accepted within the hardware community, creating a level of industry collaboration never seen in the past, while revitalizing the connection between academia and industry. The big question is whether this arrangement is just a placeholder while the industry re-learns how to develop processors, or whether this processor architecture is someth... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Liz Allan, Jesse Allen, and Karen Heyman. Canon uncorked a nanoimprint lithography system, which the company said will be useful down to about the 5nm node. Unlike traditional lithography equipment, which projects a pattern onto a resist, nanoimprint directly transfers images onto substrates using a master stamp patterned by an e-beam system. The technology has a number of limitations and... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Design & IP Arm launched the Neoverse Compute Subsystems (CSS), pre-integrated and validated configurations of Arm Neoverse platform IP, at this week's Hot Chips conference. CSS helps streamline SoC designs for data centers and is optimized for an advanced 5nm process. The first generation of CSS (Neoverse CSS N2) is based on Arm’s Neoverse N2 platform. Core count is configurable (24 to ... » read more

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