Chip Industry Week in Review

Lines are blurring between government and industry:

• On the heels of last week’s resignation demand, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan met with President Trump on Monday, with the President later saying, “The meeting was a very interesting one. His success and rise is an amazing story.”  Now, Bloomberg reports the Trump administration is in talks with Intel for the U.S. government to take a stake in the company.
• NVIDIA and AMD agreed to pay the U.S. government 15% of the revenue they earn from selling AI chips to China, part of an unprecedented financial agreement with the Trump administration. The development has some legal experts debating whether it violates the U.S. Constitution’s export clause.

Arm will add neural accelerators to its GPUs, starting in 2026, which it says can reduce GPU workload by up to 50%. The first application is an AI-driven graphics upscaler for mobile gaming.

TSMC will phase out its 6-inch wafer manufacturing business over the next two years and continue consolidating its 8-inch wafer production capacity to improve efficiency.

U.S.-based Ecolab plans to acquire Ovivo’s microelectronics ultra-pure water business for approximately $1.8 billion in cash.

In critical mineral news:

• The U.S. government is moving forward to provide $1 billion in funding opportunities to advance critical minerals and materials supply chains.  Key areas include processes to refine and alloy gallium, gallium nitride, germanium, and SiC, as well as battery materials processing.
• China’s share of global rare earth production reached nearly 70% in 2024, and it’s rising under new export licensing rules and centralized downstream control, reports TECHCET. The result is price volatility for materials like dysprosium, neodymium, and cerium, which are used in semiconductors, EVs, and wind turbines. The report notes that while other countries are developing alternative sources, most still depend on Chinese refining capacity, underscoring the urgency for domestic processing and recycling initiatives.

NIST finalized its lightweight cryptography standard (SP 800‑232) to secure Internet of Things and other highly resource‑constrained devices like RFID tags and medical implants.

Special Report: Data centers are undergoing a dramatic transformation to reduce the power consumption of high-speed data transmissions by 70% or more with co-packaged optics. To enable this change in production manufacturing, testing platforms must deliver automated, scalable processes that achieve test coverage for photonic devices that is comparable to electronic ICs.

Financial updates this week: Applied Materials, CEVA, GCT Semi, Micron (Q4 guidance), Nordic Semi, QuickLogic, Rigetti and TSMC (Q2).

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Markets and Money
Education and Training
Product News
Research
Automotive
Security
Events and Further Reading

Global

Asia

• Samsung is setting up a chip packaging R&D center in Yokohama, Japan, reports Korea Economic Daily. Operation is expected to begin in 2027.
• India‘s government approved four more semiconductor projects (SiCSem, CDIL, 3D Glass Solutions, and ASIP Technologies) and expects to bring a made-in-India chip by end of this year.
• AMD opened a new engineering lab in Penang, Malaysia.
• A fire at Japanese gas plant Kanto Denka may cause disruptions in supplying nitrogen trifluoride, which is used to clean substrate processing chambers.

USA:

• Beijing E-Town, a state-backed Chinese chip equipment firm, filed a lawsuit against Applied Materials, alleging the U.S. company misappropriated its proprietary technologies related to plasma sources and wafer surface treatment, reports Reuters.
• Think tank Brookings cautions against saddling U.S. utilities and customers with billions of dollars in investments in AI energy infrastructure buildout, given that market demand for AI could be vastly overblown: “The urgent challenge is to devise a regulatory strategy that can accommodate the energy wishes of the AI industry without putting the costs and risks on other energy customers.”
• A former Intel engineer who stole Intel trade secrets and shared them with his Microsoft bosses was sentenced to probation and a fine.

Europe:

• EnSilica established a new design center in Budapest, Hungary, focused on advanced mixed-signal designs for industrial and automotive applications.

In-Depth 

Semiconductor Engineering published its Test, Measurement and Analytics and Low Power –High Performance newsletters this week, featuring a special report, five top stories, three videos, and an opinion column:

• Special Report: Transforming Test For Co-Packaged Optics
• Metrology Under Pressure: Detecting Defects In Fine-Pitch Hybrid Bonding
• Chiplet Interfaces Embrace Failures
• Re-Architecting AI For Power
• Reliable Training Data Paramount To AI Model Success
• Will New Processor Architectures Raise Energy Efficiency?

And:

• Video: Workload-Specific Hardware Accelerators
• Video: What’s Different About HBM4
• Opinion: Physical AI Chip Sales Won’t Rival GenAI Anytime Soon

Bonus video: AI, from A to Z. First in a seven-part video series on AI in chip manufacturing.

Markets and Money

Acquisitions/Collaborations

• Infineon completed its acquisition of Marvell’s Automotive Ethernet business, which is meant to strengthen its system expertise for SDVs.
• Xanadu and DISCO Corp. teamed up to advance wafer processing techniques for ultra-low loss photonic ICs, including wafer dicing processes, specialized wafer preparation for heterogeneous integration and assembly, and polishing optimization.
• Texas-based Neurophos acquired SiliconBee to further develop energy-efficient photonic computing for data centers.
• GlobalFoundries completed its acquisition of MIPS.

Reports:

• Persistent DDR4 undersupply is expected through 2H25, with server demand pushing July PC DDR4 prices above DDR5 in a rare price inversion.
• The total semiconductor market for data centers  is expected to grow from $209B in 2024 to $492B by 2030, driven by generative AI and HPC, per Yole.
• More reports: global smart glasses market, AI server demand.

Funding:

• NeoLogic raised $10M to build server CPUs using its technology that reduces transistor count by integrating standard CMOS with topology-modified circuits.
• Syenta raised AU$8.8M for its localized electrochemical manufacturing technology that combines deposition and patterning to build high-bandwidth chip-to-chip interconnects.

Education and Training

The SEMI Foundation launched SEMIquest, an immersive STEM experience designed to ignite curiosity and connect Arizona students to career opportunities in the semiconductor industry. 

Siemens announced a new initiative, Cre8Ventures Open Higher Education Program, developed in collaboration with Arm and the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science. The program is meant to foster entrepreneurial curiosity and accelerate student-led semiconductor innovation across Europe’s technical universities.

Product News

Cadence unveiled a new app for its emulation platform that provides hardware-accelerated dynamic power analysis of billion-gate AI designs, spanning billions of cycles within a few hours with up to 97% accuracy.

Promex Industries expanded its manufacturing capabilities for advanced medical device applications by integrating a laser depaneling system and an automated solder paste inspection system.

Japan-based OKI announced the development of tiling crystal film bonding (CFB) technology for heterogeneous integration of small-diameter optical semiconductor wafers, such as indium phosphide, onto 300mm silicon wafers with ±1µm placement accuracy. The process is aimed at advancing photonics-electronics convergence for high-speed, low-power data transmission in applications such as data centers.

Normal Computing taped out a thermodynamic computing chip for accelerating AI inference, linear algebra, and sampling workloads for diffusion models.

Ansys, now part of Synopsys, will integrate NVIDIA‘s Omniverse technologies and libraries in its simulation solutions, starting with autonomy and computational fluid dynamics.

Fig.1: An Ansys Fluent simulation of vehicle aerodynamics powered by Omniverse

Rigetti announced the general availability of its 36-qubit multi-chip quantum computer.

SiMa.ai debuted a new Arm-based SoC for physical AI applications, such as robotics and automotive.

Fraunhofer IIS and Fraunhofer IWES are using acoustic emission sensors to remotely monitor damage to wind turbine rotor blades.

Research

Imec and Politecnico di Torino researchers examined the thermal impact of non-uniform power distributions on SiPs utilizing frontside and backside power delivery approaches.

Caltech scientists used a hybrid approach for storing quantum memories. They effectively translated electrical information into sound so that quantum states from superconducting qubits can survive up to 30 times longer than by using other techniques.

SLAC researchers generated a Poincaré light beam using a free-electron laser in an experiment conducted in the EUV range, with possibilities for X-ray wavelengths in future experiments.

IBM Research offered a look into its New York AI Hardware Center, which focuses on full stack solutions for AI, including projects such as in-memory analog, chip packaging and accelerators.

DARPA’s Digital RF Battlespace Emulator program addressed an increasingly complex electromagnetic environment, resulting in the largest high-fidelity, real-time virtual RF test range.

Find much more semiconductor research in SE’s technical paper library, with this week’s new additions here.

Automotive

Ford’s new $5 billion “Betting on America” plan includes the Universal EV Platform/Product System, enabling affordable family vehicles to be produced at scale. In 2027, the company expects to offer customers a $30,000 midsize four-door electric pickup.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy revised guidance for the National EV Infrastructure Formula Program. Updates to NEVI include streamlined applications, providing states with more flexibility, and ensuring charging stations are built. This is after a federal court restored $5 billion in EV charging funding that the White House tried to block.

Brooking’s Mark MacCarthy considers policy and standards surrounding AI liability for SDVs.

Tensor revealed its Robocar, the first Level-4 personal autonomous vehicle for private ownership, “a truly independent personal Robocar engineered to serve its owner, not its operator,” states the release.

Bosch and CARIAD, in cooperation with the Automated Driving Alliance, are developing their AI-based software stack for Level 2 and 3 assisted and automated driving.

Security note: Flaws in an unnamed carmaker’s online dealership exposed private customer information, including data that would make it possible to break into a vehicle remotely.

Security

Research:

• Designing with Deception: ML and Covert Gate-Enhanced Camouflaging to Thwart IC Reverse Engineering ( Univ. of Florida)
• Enabling Horizontal Collaboration in Logistics Through Secure Multi-Party Computation (AIT, Fraunhofer et al.)
• Implementation of the TCG DICE Specification into the Keystone TEE Framework (Politecnico di Torino)
• FlashVault: Versatile In-NAND Self-Encryption with Zero Area Overhead (DGIST, Georgia Tech et al.)

CISA issued a number of alerts/advisories.

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• The Next Evolution of Outlier Detection with PAT++: 6 Practical Methods to Boost Yield and Enhance Quality (August 20)
• SEMI’s Public Policy & Advocacy Office—A Valuable Resource for The Electronic Design Automation Industry (August 19)
• BACUS Quarterly Webinar: Aki Fujimura of D2S will be presenting on curvilinear masks (August 22)

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Semiconductor Engineering’s latest newsletters:

Automotive, Security and Enabling Technologies
Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials

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