Chip Industry Week In Review

SEMICON Taiwan

• Taiwanese companies could spend $20B on U.S. investment, the country’s economy minister said at the opening of the U.S. pavilion at the Semicon trade show in Taipei, per Taipei Times.
• SEMI and Silicon Catalyst inked an MoU to connect each organization’s partner companies with the aim of accelerating the commercialization of breakthrough technologies.
• Teradyne launched three new test instruments: a digital instrument built for pattern-intensive AI and compute devices; a high-speed I/O protocol ATE solution for PCIe Gen6 interfaces; and a power supply that can deliver 1280 amps per instrument.
• Qnity Electronics introduced a family of slurries for chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) steps in advanced packaging processes.
• Trumpf uncorked an ultrashort-pulse laser application that ablates silicon carbide to enable cooling systems integrated into AI chips.
• DAS Environmental Expert launched a secondary abatement solution for nitrogen oxide emissions in semiconductor manufacturing.
• Mixx Technologies released an optical connector for both the front plane and the backplane that terminates up to 24,576 fibers in a single rack unit.
• The University of Arizona and National Sun Yat-sen University launched a research and education center focused on silicon photonics.

Big deals

• Nvidia bought $3.5B worth of MediaTek convertible bonds. MediaTek will offer the NVLink Fusion platform as a design foundation for custom AI accelerator customers, and the two companies will continue collaborating in edge and automotive.
• Lyte raised $165M to scale production of custom silicon, multimodal sensors, and spatial software for robots.
• iPronics raised $125M to scale up silicon photonics-based optical circuit switching that enables AI clusters to reconfigure connectivity in real time for training and inference workloads.

Analysis

• SIA released its State of the U.S. Semiconductor Industry 2026 report, highlighting increased sales, demand drivers, new investments, and supply chain challenges.
• McKinsey & Company suggests that AI could improve build processes and operations within semiconductor fabs, potentially saving nearly $134B in functional costs over 5 to 7 years.

2D Tunnel FET

• Hong Kong Polytechnic University-led researchers developed a 2D tunnel transistor that can switch at lower voltages than conventional MOSFETs while maintaining strong current performance. The device was demonstrated at room temperature on centimeter-scale silicon substrates and meets IRDS requirements for next-gen integrated circuits, pointing toward lower-power future chips.

Photonics

• MIT and NY CREATES researchers developed a 300-mm manufacturing process for flexible, transparent silicon photonics using standard semiconductor fabrication techniques. The devices maintained their performance after thousands of bending cycles, potentially enabling new applications such as wearable sensors and curved augmented-reality displays.
• Optical chiplets promise a way out of the bandwidth, power, and reach limits of copper interconnects, but bringing photonics into advanced packages is proving more difficult than just swapping one signaling medium for another.   
• Counterpoint reports on a faster shift toward optical connectivity, with NPO, next-gen pluggables, and multicore fiber likely to see broader adoption before co-packaged optics.

Earnings:

• YoY revenue growth: Broadcom (up 86%), Credo (up 115%), and CXMT (up 874% first half).

Quick links to more news:

In-Depth
Reports and Deals
New Technologies
Security
Vehicles
Research
Quantum
Workforce | Education
Events and Webinars

Global

• India launched its ₹1,27,500 crore (~$13.4B) Semicon 2.0 program with six pillars from design to fabs and talent. Bloomberg reported the country will subsidize up to 50% of project costs for small and startup chip design firms and support capital spending on plants to produce and refurbish chipmaking equipment, as well as advanced and legacy packaging efforts.
• Sivers Semiconductors will spend $30M to expand its indium phosphide manufacturing facility in Glasgow, Scotland, to support annual production of more than 100 million CW DFB lasers for optical networking.
• AMD CPUs and GPUs will be used in EuroHPC JU‘s new LUMI-AI supercomputer in Finland.
• Boise State University and the University of Idaho received an $8M NSF grant to research microelectronics for extreme environments.

Reports and Deals

Deals

• proteanTecs‘ embedded health and performance monitoring technology will be integrated into MegaChips‘ next-generation ASIC and LSI digital systems.
• Baya Systems teamed up with AdoreSys to offer its early architectural exploration and optimization platform and fabric IP alongside ASIC design and implementation services.
• Infineon and Skeleton Technologies will collaborate on high-efficiency, resilient solid-state transformers and sidecar power solutions for modern data centers.
• mPTech integrated Infineon’s SECORA secure payment technology into its latest flagship Hammer smartwatch.

M&A, launches

• Nvidia will acquire Hugging Face, a platform for open-weight AI model deployment, for $12.9B as was reported last week by other sources. Nvidia already offers its models on the platform, which will remain open for the entire AI ecosystem without restrictions on underlying compute.
• AI software company MulticoreWare acquired Simulus Automation, a provider of design verification, protocol IP, FPGA development, and engineering services.
• CollPlant Biotechnologies acquired photonic computing startup LightSolver to expand beyond biotech.
• Pasqal listed on Nasdaq following the completion of its merger with SPAC Bleichroeder.
• SoftBank‘s data center operator SB Energy filed to go public on Nasdaq.

More funding

• Diodes Incorporated completed its $250M acquisition of ElevATE Semiconductor, a designer of AMS chips for the ATE market.
• Cyclic Materials raised $75M to recycle rare earths and critical minerals used in semiconductor, automotive, and other sectors.
• Diffraqtion added $5.8M to build quantum cameras that resolve detail below the diffraction limit for defense and space sensing.
• Zenergize Technologies raised $4M for SiC power electronics for EV chargers and solar inverters.
• S-Transistors raised €2.6M (~$3M) to build cryogenic signal control and handling ICs based on superconducting transistors.
• ChipMango raised $1.9M to connect training and engineering development to commercial semiconductor design, verification, edge AI, and intelligent hardware programs.

Reports, Opinions

• Optical transceivers have become a system-level requirement for scaling AI, with the market expected to grow to $112B in 2031 (Yole)
• Surge in AI Semiconductor Patent Filings (Anaqua)
• The search for consciousness inside AI (Economist)
• N. American PCB Demand Strengthens (Global Electronics)
• Nvidia’s NVHBM and the Fight for the Base Die (Counterpoint)
• The Race to Win the Great Semiconductor Realignment (Asia House)

New Technologies

Manufacturing, test

• Bruker unveiled a large-area Energy-Dispersive Spectroscopy detector for scanning electron microscopy with the count-rate performance of four independently operating Silicon Drift Detector segments.
• Rigaku debuted a high-resolution X-ray CT system for battery, semiconductor devices, electronic components, and advanced materials analysis.
• Tektronix introduced automated transmitter and receiver test software for PCIe 7.0 128 GT/s PAM4 designs and expanded its compliance software portfolio to HDMI 2.2 and MIPI A-PHY.
• GlobalFoundries announced PDK availability for its 22nm and 40nm UX CMOS processes built for intelligent edge devices and advanced sensing systems.
• QuickLogic released eFPGA Hard IP for GF‘s 12LP (12nm 3D FinFET) process with enhanced signal processing, scalability beyond 250K LUTs, and a configuration bit health monitor.
• GF and RAAAM Memory Technologies taped out a Gain-Cell RAM (GCRAM) test vehicle on GF’s FDX fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) platform.

Interconnects/interfaces

• Cadence‘s PCIe 6.0 PHY and controller IP, implemented in the TSMC N3 process, achieved 64 GT/s specification compliance.
• EverProX uncorked an ultra-low-power MIPI SerDes chipset for vision systems.

Design

• Andes Technology deployed ChipAgents‘ agentic AI platform across multiple processor design and verification projects, reducing a processor customization task by 30% and a separate verification workflow from 2 to 3 months to about 3 weeks.
• MIPS uncorked several developer platforms for edge inference, event-driven embedded, and physical AI.

Research

Tsinghua University researchers developed a fully in-memory photonic computing architecture that combines sensing, processing, and memory on a 7,378-neuron multicore chip. The system was demonstrated on autonomous racing-drone navigation and is designed to reduce data movement between computation and external memory.

EPFL researchers demonstrated a GaN-on-Si transistor using a polarization superjunction that sustained more than 3.4 kV, along with diodes that exceeded 3.9 kV.

Seoul National University-led researchers developed an AI method that separates overlapping semiconductor defect patterns at the pixel level using only image-level defect labels.

More research

• Leveraging HBF for Capacity-Scalable LLM Inference Acceleration (Huawei et al.)
• HW-Managed Heterogeneous HBM and Flash in LLM Inference Systems (Oxford)

Security

AI-enabled vulnerability discovery and exploitation was the top emerging risk in Q2 2026, based on a survey of 316 executives and risk managers, reports Gartner.

AMD researchers demonstrated a successful optical side-channel attack technique on AMD 7-Series FPGAs.

SEALSQ’s planned post-quantum TPM (trusted platform module) 2.0 will be rolled out with integration of wolfSSL’s wolfTPM software to support wider adoption and scalability.

As AI-driven cryptanalysis, post-quantum migration, chiplets, and custom silicon reshape the threat landscape, the semiconductor industry is confronting how to define, verify, and sign off security across increasingly complex chips and systems.

Securing the entire data center supply chain is a monumental task, and the stakes keep rising as the value of data stored in hyperscale facilities increases by the minute. With 800V DC architectures, safety and reliability challenges also increase.

Government security news

• NIST published a set of hardware security recommendations for the national semiconductor industry originating from a Sustainable Hardware Security Workshop held in January. The report outlines “unified, interoperable, and evidence-based trust models, vocabularies, and guidance” for the industry.

Security technical papers

• Extracting LLM Assets from Edge AI Chips (WPI)
• A HW-in-the-Loop Optimizer for Physical Fault Injection (Keysight)
• Hardware Keystores for AI Agent Signing Workflows: A Zero-Trust MCP Enforcement Architecture (Hardware Systems Security Lab, Huawei, et al.)
• Workload Identification with Physical Side Channels for AI Governance (Pivotal Research, Intelligence Security Laboratories)

Cybersecurity

• OpenAI‘s Astra model met the company’s internal threshold for critical cybersecurity capability.
• Nvidia and CrowdStrike announced SafeMind, an agentic cybersecurity system developed using Nvidia’s Nemotron open models by the CrowdStrike Cyber Superintelligence Lab.
• CrowdStrike also introduced Falcon Guardian, its new AI detection and response cybersecurity infrastructure solution.
• Google launched the Fairwind Program, a cybersecurity collaboration giving its customers, government agencies, and cybersecurity partners access to Google’s advanced AI and cyber defense capabilities.
• A federal grand jury in California indicted a Russian national accused of distributing malware to roughly 80,000 users of a freelance employment platform over the course of a years-long cybercrime scheme.

Upcoming security event 

• The ESD Alliance will host a Sept. 10 webinar on genAI for chip design and hardware security, with Warren Savage and University of Florida’s Mark Tehranipoor discussing multi-agent AI for SoC design, threat modeling, and security verification.

Vehicles

Partnerships

• Keysight Technologies is collaborating with the Centre for Assuring Autonomy at the University of York, focused on the safe deployment of AI in SDVs (software-defined vehicles), including developing measurable safety-scoring methodologies and creating practical frameworks for generating auditable AI safety evidence.
• Nissan and Honda agreed to create standardized ECUs for next-gen SDVs from fiscal year 2029 onward.
• Nexperia will collaborate with Aurobay Technologies on advanced power vehicle semiconductor solutions, combining Nexperia’s expertise in GaN and SiC with Aurobay’s capabilities in powertrain system design and integration.

AVs, EVs 

• Zoox and Waymo each expanded robotaxi service to several new U.S. cities this week, with Zoox beginning testing in Houston and San Diego and Waymo offering its first public rides in Denver, San Diego and Tampa.
• LG Innotek will supply automotive camera modules for Zoox’s robotaxi fleet in serial production at Zoox’s facility in Hayward, Calif.
• Renesas will bring the Autoware Foundation’s open-source end-to-end AI software to its R-Car SoC platforms to aid the development of scalable solutions supporting ADAS and full self-driving platforms.
• Electrogenic converted London’s 1973 Rolls-Royce Phantom limousine into a fully electric vehicle with a new 120 kW electric motor and a 62 kWh battery pack, giving it a range of up to 120 miles.

eVTOLs, humanoids

• Archer announced a series of city-to-city air taxi test flights in California, Florida and Texas as part of its participation in the White House’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program.
• Chip architectures in some humanoid robots resemble software-defined, autonomous vehicles with distributed, zonal compute. Others resemble a drone with centralized compute. The common denominator for all kinds of robots is a heterogeneous architecture.

Sensors

• FORE Technology is set to begin mass-producing its line of anti-pinch automotive sensors at its Suwanee, Ga. facility. The sensors are designed to prevent injuries caused by automatic side doors or lift gates “pinching” a user while closing.

Vehicle technical papers

• Deployment-Aware Testing Pipeline for IoT-Based Automotive (Mercedes et al.)
• Automotive HSMs – Architectural Challenges and Security Implications (University of Detroit Mercy)
• Vision-Based Leader-Follower Formation Control for Cooperative UAVs in GPS-Degraded Environments (AIR Lab, et al.)
• Counterfactual Long-Tail Benchmarking and Knowledge-Preserving Adaptation for Driving Affordance Prediction (Nvidia)

Quantum

IBM announced its latest quantum processor, which has 120 programmable qubits and a high-speed qubit reset architecture that is capable of executing over 100,000 circuits per second.

Xanadu updated its roadmap, aiming to have a fault-tolerant photonic quantum system with up to 200 logical qubits by 2029, and 500 the following year. It will also establish a photonics R&D and manufacturing facility backed by CAD $195M (~$140M) from the Canadian government.

California plans $9.7M to boost quantum workforce development.

Quantum technical papers

• Spin-photon interface in the telecom C-band w/long hole spin dephasing time (Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, KAIST, et al.)
• Automated electrostatic characterization of quantum dot devices in single- and bilayer heterostructures

Workforce, Education

Intel Foundation and Project Lead The Way will grant $3M to expose high schoolers to advanced manufacturing careers.

Purdue University is leading a five-university team that received $4.05M over three years in the first SRC SPARC cohort for advanced packaging and system-integration research.

AMD and Delhi University launched an AI training initiative targeting up to 10,000 students, with hands-on access to ROCm, technical workshops, and GPU cloud resources.

Pakistan completed a national semiconductor education network linking regional university clusters under its INSPIRE program, which aims to train 2,200 students and 5,000 engineers in semiconductor skills.

Events and Webinars

Upcoming webinars are here, including:

• Securing SDVs with an Arm-Based Root of Trust, Sept. 8
• One TMR tech, two ways to sense, Sept. 9
• Deploy & Scale Your Simulation in the Cloud, Sept. 10
• Gen-AI for Chip Design & Security: Savage on Security series, Sept. 10

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

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