Chip Industry Week In Review


Computex in Taiwan: Arm and Nvidia introduced an AI PC platform, RTX Spark, with an Arm-based Grace CPU, Blackwell RTX GPU, and unified memory. Cadence announced a fully autonomous virtual agentic AI design engineer, enabling customers to run dynamic simulations in automated workflows. Intel launched Xeon 6+, its first data-center CPU built on Intel Foundry's 18A process. The company... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Deals IBM and Arm are collaborating on a new dual‑architecture hardware aimed at enterprise AI and data-intensive workloads, using virtualization to boost reliability, security, scalability, and software compatibility. The goal, according to an IBM spokesperson, is to deliver side-by-side deployments of S390x-Linux and Arm-Linux virtual machines in a single kernel-based hypervisor. Nv... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Think tank IAPS' report on AI integrity attacks contends that advanced AI systems must be protected from hidden tampering, backdoors, or unauthorized changes that could alter their behavior or outputs, especially when AI adoption is scaling rapidly, with over 60% of the federal workforce now using AI every day. Geopolitics The U.S. government has drafted new export rules that may give W... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Major Deals: Taiwan-based UMC is exploring possible collaboration with Polar Semiconductor for high-volume production of 8-inch wafers at Polar’s expanded Minnesota fab, a move that could provide domestic manufacturing capacity for automotive, data center, consumer, aerospace, and defense customers. Marvell will acquire Celestial AI for $3.25B, adding photonic fabric technology for o... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


The European Union’s Chips Act Commission has approved €8.1 billion ($8.73 billion) in funding for an Important Project of Common European Interest (IPCEI). As part of this IPCEI, 56 companies, including small and medium-sized enterprises (‘SMEs') and start-ups, will undertake 68 projects in research, innovation, and deployment of microelectronics and communication technologies across th... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


Nikkei Asia reports the U.S. is urging allies, including Japan, to restrict exports of advanced semiconductors and related technology to China. The U.S. holds 12% of the global semiconductor market, Japan has a 15% share, while Taiwan and South Korea each have about a 20% share. Some U.S. companies have called for other countries to adopt U.S.-style export curbs, arguing it is unfair for only A... » read more

Week In Review, Manufacturing, Test


The U.S. is attempting to restrict sales of ASML’s deep ultra-violet (DUV) litho systems to China, according to a report from Bloomberg. The U.S. has been working to limit China's access to advanced technology for some time, and it has already limited sales of extreme ultra-violet (EUV), which is used to develop chips at the most advanced process nodes. DUV, in contrast, is used for older-nod... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers, OEMs UMC plans to build a new fab next to its existing 300mm fab in Singapore. The new fab, called Fab12i P3, will manufacture wafers based on UMC’s 22nm/28nm processes. The planned investment for this project will be $5 billion. The first phase of this greenfield fab will have a monthly capacity of 30,000 wafers with production expected to commence in late 2024. To account fo... » read more

Covid Masks And Forecasts At Semicon


Semicon West 2021 was certainty different, if not surreal, this year. The annual event was held in-person from Dec. 7-9, although there is a virtual component that runs until Jan. 7, 2022. In comparison, Semicon West was an all-virtual event in 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. At this year’s in-person event in San Francisco, attendees, exhibitors and speakers were all required to wea... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers Taiwan’s Foxconn continues to expand its efforts in the semiconductor business. Foxconn has acquired a 6-inch wafer fab and the equipment from Taiwan’s Macronix for NT$2.52 billion (US$90.76 million). With the fab, Foxconn plans to enter the wideband gap semiconductor market, namely silicon carbide (SiC). SiC devices are used in electric vehicles, a market that Foxconn is making... » read more

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