Chip Industry Week In Review


Advanced manufacturing, packaging Intel Foundry will invest €5B to expand Intel 3 capacity at its Leixlip, Ireland campus. The company also entered high-volume manufacturing for a subset of Panther Lake processors manufactured on its 18A using ASML’s High-NA EUV technology. UMC delivered the first production wafers for SILITH’s 1.6T silicon photonics platform from its 300mm Singa... » read more

Inspection And Metrology Catching Up For High-Density Fan-Out Panel Packaging


Key Takeaways:  To support AI/HPC devices, high-density fan-out on panels must deliver increased RDL layer count and micropillar height while decreasing the trace and bump/micropillar pitch.   Metrology and inspection steps assist with achieving known-good panel requirements to avoid throwing away expensive chiplets, such as HBM and TPUs.  Optical measurement systems need to acco... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


IBM unveiled a 7Å transistor architecture that uses staggered nanosheet transistors stacked on a precisely beveled angle, almost like tiles on a roof. That allows more transistors to be crammed into a given area, boosting performance by 50% or power efficiency by up to 70%. Perhaps even more important, IBM claims a 40% improvement in SRAM scaling, which is orders of magnitude faster and lower ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Dealmaking Amkor inked a 10-year agreement with TSMC to provide advanced packaging and test services in Arizona, tying TSMC’s U.S. fab expansion to domestic OSAT capacity. Trump said in a post that Apple will partner with Intel on chip design and production in the U.S., marking a second reported win for the chipmaker this month. Intel Foundry will also reportedly manufacture 3 million... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Notable deals Cadence and Intel Foundry inked a multi-year agreement to advance design technology co-optimization and create PDKs for Intel Foundry's 14A process. Nvidia and SK hynix announced a multi-year partnership to co-develop memory technology for AI infrastructure and physical AI. Teradyne unveiled an integrated test cell solution with TEL that supports known-good device scree... » 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

New Automotive Architectures Are Shaking Up Processor And Memory Choices


Key Takeaways Assisted and autonomous driving require more data from more sensors, and much faster processing of some of that data. The shift to software-defined vehicles and centralized intelligence makes it easier to identify where the most advanced processors and memories are required, and where older and less expensive technologies can be deployed. Technologies that were largely ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Big Deals and Fundings Rapidus secured US$1.7B in a new funding round from the Japanese government and the private sector to ramp 2nm production by next year. Open AI announced a $110B in new funding, with $30B from Nvidia, $30B from Softbank and $50B from Amazon. In a $100B multi-year deal, Meta will power its AI infrastructure with up to 6GW of AMD's GPUs. SambaNova and Intel ar... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Intel hired ex-Qualcomm GPU guru Eric Demers for the company's high-performance GPU push, setting the stage for a three-way battle with Nvidia and AMD. The key targets for Intel and AMD will be better power efficiency and a programming model that rivals CUDA, but don't expect Nvidia to stand still. Acquisitions Texas Instruments plans to acquire Silicon Labs for ~$7.5B cash to enhance i... » read more

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

← Older posts