Physical AI Chip Sales Won’t Rival GenAI Anytime Soon


Fig. 1: When can we send our humanoid to pick up some milk at the store? Source: ChatGPT image There has been a lot of talk about physical AI, much of it very optimistic. Physical AI is happening, but more slowly than many expect. It will not rival GenAI soon. We’ll analyze humanoids, fully autonomous vehicles, then all application-specific robots (ASRs), ending with a rough estimate ... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Apple plans to increase its U.S. investment by an additional $100 billion over four years, which includes the launch of an advanced manufacturing supply chain program, spurring a number of related chip industry announcements, including: Apple will invest in Amkor's new packaging and test facility in Arizona as its first and largest customer, and Amkor will package and test Apple silicon pr... » 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


Intel reported flat year-over year revenue for Q2, exceeding Wall Street's pessimistic expectations. In a message to employees, CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the company will: Cut about 15% of its staff, ending the year with about 75,000 employees, down from a high of nearly 132,000 in 2022; Scrap projects in Poland and Germany, consolidate other sites in central America and Southeast Asia, and s... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The U.S. government will grant licenses to NVIDIA and AMD to again sell some AI chips — NVIDIA's H20 GPU and AMD's MI308 — to Chinese companies. TrendForce projects that the availability of NVIDIA chips, in particular, will create a surge in demand from Chinese AI firms and cloud service providers, and boost high-bandwidth memory (HBM) consumption. The move could raise China’s share of... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Global semiconductor sales hit $57.8 billion in November 2024, an increase of 20.7% compared to the same month last year, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. In U.S. government news: The U.S. Department of Commerce finalized up to $325 million in CHIPS Act funding for Hemlock Semiconductor, which will support construction of a new semiconductor-grade polysilicon manufac... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is ramping up R&D for next-gen EUV and plasma-based particle sources, aiming to increase the EUV laser source power by an order of magnitude while also making it more energy-efficient. Specifically, the goal is to replace today's CO2-based laser with a solid-state laser, using a thulium-doped yttrium lithium fluoride medium to increase the laser's powe... » 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


JEDEC and the Open Compute Project rolled out a new set of guidelines for standardizing chiplet characterization details, such as thermal properties, physical and mechanical requirements, and behavior specs. Those details have been a sticking point for commercial chiplets, because without them it's not possible to choose the best chiplet for a particular application or workload. The guidelines ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


President Biden will raise the tariff rate on Chinese semiconductors from 25% to 50% by 2025, among other measures to protect U.S. businesses from China’s trade practices. Also, as part of President Biden’s AI Executive Order, the Administration released steps to protect workers from AI risks, including human oversight of systems and transparency about what systems are being used. Intel ... » read more

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