Chip Industry Week in Review

The Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit kicked off this week in San Jose, dominated by open standards, massive scaling of AI infrastructure, chiplet architectures, and energy-efficiency. Among the highlights:

An initiative to standardize data center infrastructure and advance Ethernet for AI.
New contributions to OCP’s Open Chiplet Economy ecosystem, including Arm’s new Foundation Chiplet System Architecture, which provides a baseline for how SiP designers can decompose monolithic SoCs into chiplets.
AMD‘s rack-scale platform reference design, based on the Open Rack Wide (ORW) specification.
Nvidia‘s 800 VDC architecture for megawatt-scale racks in AI data centers, which it says could improve end-to-end efficiency by up to 5% compared to current 54 V systems and reduce copper usage. Many companies announced support.
[Find more OCP-related announcements in the Market and Deals and New Technologies sections below.]

Semiconductor Research Corp. released its Microelectronics and Advanced Packaging Technologies (MAPT) Roadmap 2.0, a comprehensive update to the industry’s first 3D semiconductor roadmap with an increased focus on digital twins, workforce development, and data-centric manufacturing.

Fig.1: MAPT Roadmap 2.0. Source: SRC

GlobalFoundries joined imec’s Automotive Chiplet Program. Infineon, Silicon Box, STATS ChipPAC, and TIER IV also have committed to join the program.

Geopolitics:

Looming trade talks and China’s latest salvo on rare earths/magnets restrictions prompted a number of responses as the global chip industry increasingly is caught in the crosshairs:

The U.S. threatened an extra 100% tariff and other restrictions, and EU officials are pursuing a joint response with the U.S. and other allies due to rare earth supply chain concerns.
The Dutch government took control of Nexperia, a Chinese chip firm headquartered in the Netherlands, citing worries about technology transfer to China. [Silicon Saxony offers more background here.]
ASML downplayed concerns about rare earth curbs after this week’s earnings call, as did Foxconn.

New edge AI technologies were unveiled at Synaptics Tech Day and Infineon’s OktoberTech in Silicon Valley this week:

Synaptics launched its Astra SL2600 series of multimodal Edge AI processors, purpose-built for applications such as smart appliances and autonomous robotic systems. The SL2610 line includes the first production deployment of Google’s RISC-V-based Coral NPU.
Infineon expanded its Edge AI portfolio with the DEEPCRAFT AI Suite, a set of software, tools, and solutions to help customers in tegrate AI into their products.

Fig.2: Humanoid robot technology based on Infineon’s edge AI. Source: Semiconductor Engineering

Fig.3: Capacitive pressure-sensing technology built with Synaptics’ edge AI. Source: Semiconductor Engineering

Special Reports:

IR drop is becoming more problematic for a growing proportion of designs, an indication that the power delivery network is not providing enough current to parts of the design when required. Unfortunately, there is no easy fix to this problem.
Reducing nuisance defects requires tighter integration of inspection, test, and analytics. Metrology is emerging as a key line of defense, identifying sources of variation and providing the data needed to distinguish between nuisance and killer defects.

Financial updates this week: ASML, Samsung, TSMC .

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Market and Deals
New Technologies
Security
Automotive
Research
Education and Training
Events and Further Reading

Global

Asia:

China’s SiCarrier subsidiary, Yunqifang, launched two EDA software products for schematic capture and PCB design.
Tokyo Electron completed construction on its new R&D site in Kumamoto, Japan.
Google announced its first AI hub in India, enabling Google to deliver its full AI stack deployment across the country.

Europe:

Germany published its microelectronics strategy, aiming to boost the country’s role as a major chip location. In addition, a recent survey found that 92% of German companies are concerned about the threat of conflict between China and Taiwan impacting the IC supply.
Imec inaugurated its new Baden-Württemberg office in Germany, focused on advancements in automotive chiplets.
Infineon will purchase green electricity from PNE AG’s Schlenzer and Kittlitz III wind farms in Brandenburg, Germany.
IBM and the Basque Government unveiled the first IBM Quantum System Two in San Sebastián, Spain.
The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking selected 13 AI Factory Antennas to complement existing AI Factories and support the continued development of national AI ecosystems.

Americas:

The U.S. Senate passed the GAIN AI Act, legislation aimed at prioritizing American access to AI chips, and now awaits final approval.
TSMC is looking to expand further in Arizona for its “gigafab” cluster.
Western Digital opened a 25,600sf high-capacity hard disk drive System Integration and Test Lab in Minnesota.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Test, Measurement and Analytics and Low Power – High Performance newsletters this week, featuring:

Two special reports:

Four top stories:

Additional reporting this week:

Video: Commonality in Correlation Analysis
Video: Multi-Die Verification

Market and Deals

Deals

Worries about an AI bubble are not having a noticeable impact on AI investments and deals:

Meta will use Arm’s Neoverse-based data center platforms to power its AI ranking and recommendation systems and optimize AI software for Arm architectures.
OpenAI plans to design its own custom AI accelerators, which will be used in systems featuring Broadcom‘s Ethernet networking solutions. The companies plan to deploy 10 gigawatts of systems over four years.
Oracle will offer an AI supercluster powered by 50,000 AMD Instinct MI450 Series GPUs. Oracle also will offer a computing cluster for high-performance AI inference and training workloads with Nvidia’s GPUs and Ethernet platform.
Nscale will supply about 200,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs for Microsoft‘s AI infrastructure.
Meta and Oracle will use Nvidia‘s Spectrum-X Ethernet networking switches in AI data center networks.

M&A

Keysight completed its $1.46 billion acquisition of Spirent Communications, a provider of automated test and assurance solutions for networks, cybersecurity, and positioning.
Nvidia, Microsoft, and others plan to purchase Aligned Data Centers for $40B.
VeriSilicon will acquire the Shanghai subsidiary of Pixelworks, a provider of video and display processors, for about $133 million.
Renesas is exploring the sale of its timing division, reports Reuters.

Funding/Investments:

JPMorganChase is pouring $10B initially — and $1.5T over the next decade — into targeted technologies, including critical minerals mining, microelectronics, and more.
Tachyum raised $220M to tape out its universal processor with a single homogeneous architecture for AI/ML, HPC, and cloud workloads, and is preparing for an IPO as early as 2027.
Movandi raised $40M for its RF chipsets, beamforming silicon, phased-array antennas, and repeater systems for wireless infrastructure.
Vertical Semiconductor raised $11M for its vertical GaN transistors that push power conversion closer to the chip with less power loss and heat.

Reports:

Memory market and global smartphone (Counterpoint); electronic gases materials (Techcet); rare earth magnets, two-phase liquid cooling (IDTechEx); PC shipments (Gartner).
Analysts on AI:
- Why AI obedience may be more dangerous than AI rebellion (Brookings)
- China, the United States, and the AI Race (CFR)
- Humanoid robots: Crossing the chasm (McKinsey)

New Technologies

Specs and standards

The MIPI Alliance released SoundWire I3S, a new specification that unifies control and data for audio transport over a single scalable and power-efficient interface.
JEDEC released its annual JESD400-5D DDR5 Serial Presence Detect Contents standard. This latest version adds support for memory modules executing up to DDR5-9200 speeds, codes for the new Small Outline Compression Attached Memory Module, and expands error logging information for Multiplexed Rank Dual In-Line Memory Modules.

Infineon launched its next-gen, highly integrated 60 GHz CMOS radar sensor for low-power IoT solutions.

FujiFilm introduced a pressure measurement film design for heat-pressing processes in semiconductor and automotive manufacturing.

Apple announced its 3nm M5, a next-gen 10-core GPU architecture with a neural accelerator in each core, enabling GPU-based AI workloads to run faster with over 4x the peak GPU compute performance compared to M4.

Data center technology:

Intel will make an inference-optimized data center GPU based on the Xe3P microarchitecture with 160GB of LPDDR5X memory.
Infineon will support the 800 VDC power architecture announced by Nvidia for AI infrastructure. Future server boards will operate in 800 VDC through the company’s hot-swap technology.
Toshiba verified 12-disk stacking technology for HDDs using a glass substrate, which it plans to use in 40TB-class HDDs for data centers in 2027.
Microchip introduced a line of PCIe Gen 6 switches on a 3nm process that support up to 160 lanes for high-density AI system connectivity.
Upscale AI debuted its scale-up AI interconnect architecture.
Marvell announced active copper cable (ACC) linear equalizers that support 800G and 1.6T copper interconnects.

Wi-Fi:

Broadcom announced an 800G AI Ethernet Network Interface Card (NIC) capable of interconnecting hundreds of thousands of XPUs, as well as Wi-Fi 8 chips.
Skyworks expanded its Wi-Fi 7 portfolio with front-end modules (FEMs) and bulk acoustic wave (BAW) filters for the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands.

Security

Research

ETH Zurich researchers discovered a vulnerability specifically affecting AMD’s security technology for confidential computing environments. The vulnerability could allow hackers to bypass the protection mechanisms of confidential computing environments. AMD posted an update to its security bulletin.
University of Missouri researchers used AI to detect hidden hardware trojans through a method that’s proved 97% accurate.
CryptOracle: A Modular Framework to Characterize FHE (Univ.of Central Florida, UW-Madison)
Benchmarking LLM Knowledge and Reasoning Across Heterogeneous Cyber Threat Intel. (Virginia Tech, Berkeley)
Stealing AI Model Weights Through Covert Communication Channels (Sorbonne, CNRS)

CISA issued an emergency directive in response to a nation-state actor compromising F5 systems and exfiltrating proprietary source code. The stolen code, including details on vulnerabilities, poses an imminent threat to organizations using F5 devices and software.

New products:

Infineon will provide the SLC27 security controller with a Common Criteria-certified cryptography library featuring the PQC algorithms ML-KEM and ML-DSA, enabling OEMs to integrate quantum-resistant security into their designs.
Secure-IC enabled Silicon Labs’ Series 3 within its Secure Vault security subsystem to achieve the world’s first PSA Level 4 certification.
Lattice Semiconductor introduced secure control FPGAs with CNSA 2.0-compliant post-quantum cryptography support and hardware root of trust.

CHIPS Alliance updated its Caliptra hardware root of trust project, adding ML-DSA and ML-KEM with side channel countermeasures.

The Apple Security Bounty program will double its top award to $2 million. The program has awarded over $35 million to more than 800 security researchers, with multiple individual reports earning $500,000 rewards.

CISA issued new alerts/advisories.

Automotive

New technology:

Keysight announced an optical automotive Ethernet transmitter test solution for nGBASE-AU Standard, which enables faster, more reliable in-vehicle networking for software-defined and autonomous vehicles.
Infineon introduced its first GaN transistor family qualified by the Automotive Electronics Council. The transistors are targeted at low-voltage infotainment systems, future HV product solutions in onboard chargers, and traction inverters.
ChipSync and Cortus partnered to deliver RISC-V automotive solutions in India, aimed at accelerating the adoption of standard, scalable, and high-performance solutions in the country’s automotive sector.
Georgia Tech researchers developed a way to quickly calculate safe speeds for curves using sensors built into smartphones.

Industry News:

GM reported that it would take a $1.6B hit in earnings, mainly due to a drop in EV capacity and canceling of EV supplier contracts.
European carmakers could face disruption to manufacturing without a resolution to a trade and IP dispute between China and the Dutch government over chipmaker Nexperia.
Mobileye, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Horizon Robotics, and Huawei will emerge as the top 5 SoC suppliers for ADAS and autonomous vehicles with a combined share of over 78% by 2035, according to Counterpoint Research.
McKinsey reported that Chinese EV makers launch new models in about 24 months, compared with up to 45 months for mass-market OEMs.

Research

Sub-resolution grating for improved process window control in high/hyper NA EUV lithography (KU Leuven, imec)
Improving AI Efficiency in Data Centers by Power Dynamic Response (Cambridge et al.)
Threshold switching in vertically aligned MoS₂/SiO_xheterostructures based on silver ion migration (RWTH Aachen)
Strain Control of Valley Polarization Dynamics in a 2D Semiconductor via Exciton Hybridization (Freie Universität)
Brain-computer interface for a patient with quadriplegia (TU Munich)

Education and Training

The Cadence Giving Foundation is committed to expanding the AI Hub at San Jose State University over several years to equip students with skills, hands-on training, and experience in AI.

Also, Cadence and SkyWater are offering another multi-project wafer shuttle run on the SKY130 open-source process.

SEMI announced the opening of the Regional Node Request for Proposals for the National Network for Microelectronics Education to accelerate and improve microelectronics talent development across the U.S.

Lam Research was recognized by the Colorado School of Mines for contributing more than $1M in research funding to the university over the last 10 years.

Amazon and Carnegie Mellon University launched the CMU-Amazon AI Innovation Hub to advance research in generative AI, robotics, natural language processing and cloud computing.

Events and Further Reading

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

- Pushing more power with CoolGaN (Oct. 22)
- Accelerating RTL-to-GDS Digital Implementation With Generative & Agentic AI (Oct. 29)

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

EVENTS	Date	Location

IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture: MICRO 2025	Oct 18 – 22	Seoul, Korea
SPIE Optifab 2025	Oct 20 – 23	Rochester, NY
Semiconductor Traceability and Provenance Workshop (NIST)	Oct 21	Gaithersburg, Maryland
RISC-V Summit North America	Oct 22 – 23	Santa Clara, CA
CadenceConnect: Photonics and Quantum Technologies	Oct 22 – 23	San Jose, Ca/ Virtual
ICCAD 2025: International Conference on Computer-Aided Design	Oct 26 – 30	Munich, Germany
Jasper User Group 2025	Oct 29 – 30	San Jose, CA
Electronics Packaging Days (Fraunhofer)	Nov 6 – 7	Berlin
Phil Kaufman Awards	Nov 6	San Jose, CA
SEMIEXPO Vietnam	Nov 7 – 8	Hanoi City
SC25: High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis	Nov 16 – 21	St. Louis, MO
Hardwear.io Security Training and Conference	Nov 17 – 21	Amsterdam
SEMICON Europe	Nov 18 – 21	Munich, Germany
MEMS and Imaging Sensors	Nov 19 – 20	Munich, Germany
SIA Awards Dinner	Nov 20	San Jose, CA

Find all events here.