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

Americas Chip Funding Energizes Industry


This is the second in a series of articles tracking government chip investments. See part one here (global),  part 3 covering EMEA is here and Asia here. Since the first announcement of a non-binding preliminary memorandum of terms with BAE Systems in December 2023, the U.S. Department of Commerce has rolled out comprehensive plans to support more than a dozen companies in order to shore up... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Imec announced a new automotive chiplet consortium to evaluate which different architectures and packaging technologies are best for automotive applications. Initial members includes Arm, ASE, Cadence, Siemens, Synopsys, Bosch, BMW, Tenstorrent, Valeo, and SiliconAuto. Imec also launched star, a global network bringing together automotive and semiconductor innovators to address technological c... » 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


Concerns mount on the use of American-manufactured semiconductors in Russian weapons, with Analog Devices, AMD, Intel and TI set to testify next week before the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Also, U.S. and other government agencies issued a joint advisory and more details about ongoing Russian military cyberattacks, espionage, and sabotage. The U.S. Commerce Departmen... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


The U.S. Department of Commerce and Texas Instruments (TI) signed a non-binding preliminary memorandum of terms to provide up to $1.6 billion in CHIPS Act funding towards TI’s investment of over $18 billion for three 300mm semiconductor wafer fabs under construction in Texas and Utah. TI also expects to get about $6 billion to $8 billion from the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Investmen... » read more

Framework For Early Anomaly Detection In AMS Components Of Automotive SoCs


A technical paper titled “Enhancing Functional Safety in Automotive AMS Circuits through Unsupervised Machine Learning” was published by researchers at University of Texas at Dallas, Intel Corporation, NXP Semiconductors, and Texas Instruments. Abstract: "Given the widespread use of safety-critical applications in the automotive field, it is crucial to ensure the Functional Safety (FuSa) ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Jesse Allen, Karen Heyman, and Liz Allan Renesas will acquire Transphorm, which designs and manufactures gallium nitride power devices, for about $339 million. GaN, which is a wide-bandgap technology, is used for high-voltage applications in a slew of markets, including EVs and EV fast chargers, as well as data centers and industrial applications. Cadence acquired Invecas, a provider o... » read more

Money Pours Into New Fabs And Facilities


Fabs, packaging, test and assembly, and R&D all drew major funding in 2023. Companies poured money into offshore locations, such as India and Malaysia, to access a larger workforce and lower costs, while also partnering with governments to secure domestic supply chains amid ongoing geopolitical turmoil. Looking ahead, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, and data applications... » read more

An Entangled Heterarchy


For decades, a form of structural hierarchy has been the principal means of handling complexity in chip design. It's not always perfect, and there is no ideal way in which to divide and conquer because that would need to focus on the analysis being performed. In fact, most systems can be viewed from a variety of different hierarchies, equally correct, and together forming a heterarchy. The e... » read more

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