Chip Industry Week in Review


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

V-NAND PUFs (Seoul National University, SK hynix)


A new technical paper titled "Concealable physical unclonable functions using vertical NAND flash memory" was published by researchers at Seoul National University and SK hynix. The paper proposes "a concealable PUF using V-NAND flash memory by generating PUF data through weak Gate-Induced-Drain-Leakage (GIDL) erase." Find the technical paper here. June 2025. Park, SH., Koo, RH., Yang,... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Podcast: imec's roadmap and a one-on-one interview with the European research house's chief strategy officer. China's Xiaomi debuted an in-house-designed 10-core mobile SoC built on a 3nm process. The company did not identify the foundry. It also announced plans to invest 50 billion yuan (~$7B) over the next decade to develop high-end smartphone chips, as part of a 200 billion yuan (~$28B) c... » read more

Three-Way Race To 3D-ICs


Intel Foundry, TSMC, and Samsung Foundry are scrambling to deliver all the foundational components of full 3D-ICs, which collectively will deliver orders of magnitude improvements in performance with minimal power sometime within the next few years. Much attention has been focused on process node advances, but a successful 3D-IC implementation is much more complex and comprehensive than just... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


To listen to the podcast version, click here. TSMC unveiled an unusually detailed roadmap at this week's North America Technology Symposium, including future architectures for 3D-ICs for high-performance computing and small, extremely low-power chips for AR/VR glasses, and two implementations of system-on-wafer. Fig. 1: TSMC's future packaging and stacking roadmap. Source: TSMC The ... » read more

2030 Data Center AI Chip Winners: The Trillion Dollar Club


At the start of 2025, I believed AI was overhyped, ASICs were a niche, and a market pullback was inevitable. My long-term view has changed dramatically. AI technology and adoption is accelerating at an astonishing pace. One of the GenAI/LLM leaders, or Nvidia, will be the first $10 Trillion market cap company by 2030. Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly improving in both capability and ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Semiconductor industry energy consumption grew 125% between 2015 and 2023, while direct greenhouse gas emissions rose 23% in the same period, according to the Europe think tank Interface, which analyzed corporate social responsibility reports from 28 global chip manufacturers. CSIS' new report "Understanding U.S. Allies’ Current Legal Authority to Implement AI and Semiconductor Export Cont... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Intel said its new fab in Licking County, Ohio will be delayed due to financial struggles and a need to align chip production with market demand, reported the Columbus Dispatch. Construction is now estimated to be completed in 2030, with operations to start in 2030 or 2031. The company said it already has invested $3.7 billion locally. Apple plans to invest more than $500 billion in the U.S... » read more

Research Bits: Feb. 25


Recording synaptic connections Researchers from Harvard University built a silicon chip capable of recording synaptic signals from a large number of neurons and used it to catalogue more than 70,000 synaptic connections from about 2,000 rat neurons. They hope the device is a step in creating a detailed synaptic connection map of the brain. The chip contains an array of 4,096 microhole elect... » read more

Memory Wall Problem Grows With LLMs


The growing imbalance between the amount of data that needs to be processed to train large language models (LLMs) and the inability to move that data back and forth fast enough between memories and processors has set off a massive global search for a better and more energy- and cost-efficient solution. Much of this is evident in the numbers. The GPU market is forecast to reach $190 billion in ... » read more

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