Chip Industry Week In Review


Space Forge autonomously generated plasma aboard its ForgeStar-1 satellite, utilizing extreme low Earth orbit (LEO) conditions needed for gas-phase crystal growth of wide- and ultra-wide bandgap materials, GaN, SiC, aluminum nitride, and diamonds. Copper prices surged to a historic record of $12,600 per metric ton, an increase of more than 40% YOY, which will impact the cost of data center b... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Deals of the week: Arteris announced plans to acquire cybersecurity provider Cycuity. “Expanding our technology portfolio to include Cycuity’s hardware security assurance products will enable our customers to achieve secure on-chip data movement,” said Charlie Janac, chairman and CEO of Arteris. Qualcomm acquired Ventana Micro Systems, a maker of RISC-V data center-class CPU IP. ... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Samsung reportedly is hiking memory chip prices by 30% to 60% due to high demand from AI data centers and constrained supplies. Those shortages are causing ripples elsewhere. SMIC, China's largest foundry, said its customers are holding back orders for other types of semiconductor due to concerns about memory supplies. Meanwhile, interest in photonics and power semiconductors is picking up, ... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Amkor, TSMC, and Cadence partnered with Tesoro VC, which will serve as the lead operator of a new Global AI + Semiconductor Startup Hub and a Global Design Center in Phoenix, Arizona, aimed at chip innovation, startup growth, and advanced manufacturing. Nvidia will invest $5 billion in Intel common stock at a purchase price of $23.28 per share and the companies will collaborate on AI infrastru... » read more

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


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


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


By Adam Kovac, Gregory Haley, and Liz Allan. Cadence plans to acquire BETA CAE Systems for $1.24 billion, the latest volley in a race to sell multi-physics simulation and analysis across a broad set of customers with deep pockets. Cadence said the deal opens the door to structural analysis for the automotive, aerospace, industrial, and health care sectors. Under the terms of the agreement, 6... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Susan Rambo, Karen Heyman, and Liz Allan. Renesas plans to acquire Altium, maker of PCB design software, for $5.9 billion. In a conference call, Renesas CEO Hidetoshi Shibata cited Altium's PCB design software and digital twin virtual modeling as key components of its future strategy. "I believe it will generate transformational value for our combined customers and our stakeholders," Shib... » read more

Autonomous Vehicles: Not Ready Yet


The swirl of activity around L4 and L5 vehicles has yet to result in a successful demonstration of an autonomous vehicle that can navigate the streets of a city or highway without incident, and there is a growing body of real-world data showing that much work still needs to be done. Robo-taxi trials in big cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and soon San Diego, are proving that autono... » read more

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