STMicroelectronics has reportedly announced new plans to partner with Chinese foundry Hua Hong, arguing that having local manufacturing in China is vital to its competitive position as a supplier to the Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers. This undoubtedly legitimate strategy highlights the intricacies inherent in transitioning from the interdependencies of yesterday’s globalization to the current era of geopolitics-driven subsidies and tariffs. It’s worth noting that Europe-headquartered STMicroelectronics will receive a 2 billion euros State subsidy to build a silicon carbide facility in Italy; and that the Chinese electric vehicles imported into Europe are currently subject to EU tariffs.

U.S. CHIPS Act awards: Intel, BAE Systems, Rocket Lab

The U.S. Department of Commerce has awarded Intel up to $7.865 billion in direct funding under the CHIPS Incentives Program’s Funding Opportunity for Commercial Fabrication Facilities. The award follows the previously signed preliminary memorandum of terms, announced on March 20, 2024. This funding will directly support Intel’s expected U.S. investment of nearly $90 billion by the end of the decade. As noted by Reuters, the amount is lower than the $8.5 billion announced in March, after Intel won a separate $3 billion award from the Pentagon. Reportedly, Intel has already met some initial project milestones and will receive at least $1 billion of the CHIPS award before the end of December.

Two other CHIPS Act awards were recently finalized by the U.S. Department of Commerce, both of them to defense/aerospace suppliers. BAE Systems Electronic Systems will receive up to $35.5 million in direct funding, to support the modernization of the company’s Microelectronics Center in Nashua, New Hampshire, and quadruple its production capacity for Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits. Rocket Lab, the parent company of SolAero Technologies, will receive up to $23.9 million in direct funding to support the modernization and expansion of the company’s facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which will increase the company’s compound semiconductor production by 50% within the next three years. Rocket Lab is one of two companies in the United States that specialize in the production of space-grade solar cells that power spacecrafts and satellites.

Read the rest of Intel to get $7.86 billion CHIPS Act award; Risc-V-based universal processor; SMIC’s yields; Nvidia’s music generation AI model

Artificial intelligence is the common underlying theme in most of the news this week. But first, some CHIPS Act updates.

Biden-Harris administration to finalize some subsidies

Some of the last moves from the Biden-Harris administration include finalizing part of the planned subsidies to support the U.S. semiconductor industry. TSMC Arizona has been awarded up to $6.6 billion to support the company’s planned investment of more than $65 billion in three greenfield leading-edge fabs in Phoenix, Arizona. GlobalFoundries has been awarded up to $1.5 billion to support the expansion of its existing fab in Malta, New York, the upgrading of its existing fab in Essex Junction, Vermont, and the construction of a new fab in Malta, New York. In addition to that, Akash Systems (Oakland, CA) has signed a non-binding preliminary memorandum of terms with the U.S. Department of Commerce under the CHIPS and Science Act to receive over $68 million in direct funding to support the operational ramp-up of its Diamond Cooling semiconductor technologies.

Nvidia accelerates CAE digital twins

Nvidia has announced an Omniverse Blueprint that enables industry software developers to help their CAE customers create digital twins with real-time interactivity. Software developers such as Altair, Ansys, Cadence and Siemens can use the Nvidia Omniverse Blueprint, a reference workflow that includes Nvidia acceleration libraries, physics-AI frameworks and interactive physically based rendering to achieve – according to the company – 1,200x faster simulations and real-time visualization. One of the first applications of the blueprint is computational fluid dynamics simulations. Ansys ran Fluent at the Texas Advanced Computing Center on 320 Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips. A 2.5-billion-cell automotive simulation was completed in just over six hours, which would have taken nearly a month running on 2,048 x86 CPU cores.

Read the rest of Nvidia-powered CAE acceleration; new Keysight EDA software; CoWoS roadmap; new datacenter inference solution

Let’s start with a quick geopolitical update: Vietnam is emerging as a destination for new semiconductor-related investments. According to press reports, Foxconn intends to step up its presence in the country to produce integrated circuits, and multiple players – both foreign and domestic companies – are expanding capacity in Vietnam for chip testing and packaging.

EDA updates

Siemens Digital Industries Software has added the Innexis product suite to its Veloce hardware-assisted verification and validation system, to address demand for shift-left software development in the design process of complex SoCs. Currently, the Innexis product suite consists of: Innexis Developer Pro, which provides a connected development flow from virtual to hybrid to full RTL; Innexis Architecture Native Acceleration, a cloud-based high-speed virtual platform; Innexis Virtual System Interconnect, to facilitate the creation and simulation of comprehensive system level digital twin platforms by connecting multi-behavioral virtual and physical subsystems.

Altair PollEx for ECAD, a PCB verification tool, is now available as a one-year free trial. The tool enables engineers – early in the design cycle – to review designs, analyze, verify, and assess physical, logical, and electrical attributes, and detect potential manufacturing and electrical issues. It can also boost production yield with ECAD integration, and ensure collaboration throughout the PCB development process. Altair PollEx for ECAD integrates with major PCB design tools like the ones from Altium, Cadence, Siemens, and Zuken.

Celus’ AI-driven automation has been integrated with Siemens’ PCB design solutions, enabling a workflow that automates routine design tasks like schematic generation. This cooperation aims at enhancing accessibility and efficiency in PCB design for small to medium-sized businesses and independent engineers.

Excellicon has re-engineered its core timing graph engine to address the performance requirements of timing constraints generation and verification in complex SoC designs, characterized by a surge in gate count and the proliferation of clock domains. According to the company, its newly developed Hyper-Graph technology delivers a 3X-5X run time speed improvement over the nearest competitor.

Read the rest of Shifting left software development; advancements in car power architectures; Japan’s semiconductor subsidies; ADI acquires Flex Logix

Will Donald Trump’s victory have an impact on the semiconductor industry? Should the industry expect changes to the CHIPS for America program and/or a different approach in the so-called “chip war” with China and related geopolitical issues? As the world waits for more insights, let’s briefly report some recent updates on both fronts. As for the CHIPS for America program, locations have been selected for the “Extreme Ultraviolet Accelerator”, which will operate within NY Creates’ NanoTech Complex in Albany, New York, supported by an investment of $825 million; and for the “Design and Collaboration Facility”, which will be based in Sunnyvale, California. As for geopolitical tensions, SpaceX has reportedly asked Taiwanese suppliers to transfer manufacturing off the island, because of geopolitical risks; and the British government has reportedly ordered China-registered Future Technology Devices International Holding Ltd to sell 80.2% of Scotland-based chip company FTDI over national security risks.

Siemens-Altair deal

A few days after the acquisition announcement, let’s take a closer look at the Siemens-Altair deal. The announcement press release from Siemens offers a glimpse into how the combined product offering will look like. Altair’s simulation portfolio, with strength in mechanical and electromagnetic capabilities, will enhance Siemens’s Digital Twin to deliver a full-suite, physics-based, simulation portfolio as part of Siemens Xcelerator (which is Siemens’s development platform to help companies become digital enterprises). Altair’s data science and AI-powered simulation capabilities will be leveraged to allow anyone, from engineers to generalists, to access simulation expertise. And Altair’s data science capabilities will boost Siemens’s expertise in product lifecycle and manufacturing processes. Clearly, from a technology point of view, the Siemens-Altair deal is not just about EDA, as both companies offer many software tools targeted at industries other than semiconductors. Altair, for example, also offers HPC & Cloud tools, AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) solutions, data analytics and more. However, taking EDA only into account, one could see this deal as a way to boost the former Mentor Graphics offering with the addition of Altair’s multiphysics simulation capabilities. From this point of view, the Siemens-Altair deal can be likened to the Synopsys acquisition of Ansys. Also, the Siemens-Altair deal confirms the EDA concentration trend, with the “big three” getting ever bigger.

Read the rest of Siemens-Altair deal; rumored OpenAI-Broadcom chip; 0.017 nm precision in chip stacking; transistors operating at 0.3 volts; Intel backstories

An update on the litigation between Arm and Qualcomm: Arm has reportedly given Qualcomm a 60-day notice of the cancellation of its license. However, some investors and analysts believe the two companies will reach a settlement ahead of the trial, which is scheduled to start in December.

Siemens acquires Altair

Siemens has signed an agreement to acquire Altair Engineering in a transaction which assigns Altair an enterprise value of approximately USD 10 billion. More details in our next post.

Deneb’s architecture modeling tool for AI SoCs

EDA startup Deneb Design has announced the availability of an architecture modeling and exploration tool for AI-enabled system-on-chip products. The tool, called Deneb SoC, includes a library of cycle-accurate and cycle-approximate architectural block models such as CPU, memory subsystem, network-on-chip, tensor and vector processing units, GPU etc. A typical use case of Deneb SoC is to simulate the compute pipeline of a neural processing unit that is executing a machine learning model, to properly size the different components. According to the company, still today SoC architecture design and IP selection are often based on simple spreadsheet analysis or engineer’s intuitions.

Read the rest of Siemens acquires Altair; AI architecture modeling; IBM demonstrates 21nm lines; limited effectiveness of U.S. export restrictions

A quick foundry update. While TSMC posted excellent results for the third quarter of 2024 (year over year, revenue increased 39.0% while net income and diluted EPS both increased 54.2%), Samsung Foundry is reportedly struggling with the lack of major customers for its upcoming Taylor, Texas, fab. According to Reuters, this would be the reason why Samsung has postponed taking deliveries of ASML chipmaking equipment for the new factory.

Intel and AMD form the “x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group”

Archrivals Intel and AMD are collaborating for the sake of x86 architecture’s competitiveness. The two companies have created an “x86 ecosystem advisory group”, whose founding members also include Broadcom, Dell, Google Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat. The intended outcomes from this initiative will include enhancing customer choice and compatibility across hardware and software, while accelerating their ability to benefit from new, cutting-edge features; simplifying architectural guidelines to enhance software consistency and standardize interfaces across x86 product offerings from Intel and AMD; enabling greater and more efficient integration of new capabilities into operating systems, frameworks and applications. According to Reuters, the creation of the x86 advisory group is a reaction to growing competition from Arm, and one of its key goals will be to ensure that software can run on both Intel and AMD x86 processors without any modifications.

Arteris’ NoC tiling enables tile-based SoC architecture

Described as “an innovative evolution of its network-on-chip IP products” based on its “proven, robust network-on-chip IP”, the tiling capabilities announced by Arteris promise to pave the way to tile-based architectures for the SoCs that include AI acceleration blocks. According to Arteris, by allowing the replication of the same tile, tile-based architectures simplify design and verification, make it easy to scale up AI performance, and enable a significant power reduction by turning off individual tiles. The new tiling capability, along with mesh topology, is being offered by Arteris’ FlexNoC and Ncore NoC IP products.

Read the rest of Intel, AMD in x86 alliance; NoC tiling; optical connectivity funding; LLMs’ reasoning

Let’s start by paying tribute to SpaceX’s engineering prowess: those who missed the incredible images of the Super Heavy booster rocket getting back on the launch pad – and then getting caught up by the launch tower – might want to catch up by watching this video from Bloomberg.

ChipAgents: adding AI agents to existing EDA flows

California-based startup Alpha Design has introduced ChipAgents, an artificial intelligence solution (an “AI agent”) meant to be added to existing EDA flows. According to the company, ChipAgents enables designers to transform their concepts into precise design specifications using simple language prompts; analyzes and generates RTL design specs and code; auto-completes Verilog; automates the creation of testbenches; and, through real-time learning from simulations, it autonomously verifies and debugs design code.

New AMD Instinct MI325X accelerator challenging Nvidia H200

On occasion of its “Advancing AI” 2024 event, AMD announced its latest accelerator and networking solutions: the Instinct MI325X accelerators, the Pensando Pollara 400 NIC and the Pensando Salina DPU. According to the company, the Instinct MI325X accelerators deliver industry-leading memory capacity and bandwidth, with 256GB of HBM3E supporting 6.0TB/s, offering 1.8X more capacity and 1.3x more bandwidth than the Nvidia H200. The AMD Instinct MI325X also offers 1.3X greater peak theoretical FP16 and FP8 compute performance compared to Nvidia H200. This translates into up to 1.3X the inference performance on Mistral 7B at FP16, 1.2X the inference performance on Llama 3.1 70B at FP8 and 1.4X the inference performance on Mixtral 8x7B at FP16 of the H200. Besides introducing new chips, AMD has also confirmed it continues to invest in its ROCm open software stack for AI.

Read the rest of AI agents in EDA; new AMD MI325X AI accelerator; low-power alternative to FP multiplication; China’s mature node production

Artificial intelligence is the underlying theme for many of this week’s news updates, ranging from the development of new semiconductor materials to PCB assembly pricing.

U.S. government-funded R&D on new materials: UWBGS, AI-powered experimentation

Raytheon has been awarded a three-year, two-phase contract from DARPA to develop foundational ultra-wide bandgap semiconductors, or UWBGS, based on diamond and aluminum nitride technology. Phase one of the contract will focus on developing diamond and aluminum nitride semiconductor films and integrating them onto electronic devices. Phase two will focus on optimizing and maturing the use of these films onto larger diameter wafers for sensor applications. UWBGS defense applications will include radar and communication systems and high-speed weapon systems such as hypersonics.

The U.S. Department of Commerce has announced an open competition demonstrating how AI can assist in developing new sustainable semiconductor materials and processes that meet industry needs and can be designed and adopted within five years. CHIPS for America anticipates up to $100 million in funding to award recipients that develop university-led, industry-informed, collaborations about artificial intelligence-powered autonomous experimentation (AI/AE) relevant to sustainable semiconductor manufacturing. AI/AE combines automated synthesis and characterization tools with an AI “planner” to determine the next round of an experimental campaign, vastly accelerating the design of new materials and the acquisition of materials data.

Cerebras to go public

Cerebras, the AI company mostly known for its wafer-scale chips, has filed a registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission relating to a proposed initial public offering of its Class A common stock. The company intends to list its stock on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker symbol “CBRS.” By reading the IPO paperwork, EETimes has found that a single customer, G42, accounted for 83% of Cerebras’ revenue in 2023 and 87% in the first half of 2024. G42 is an AI development holding company based in Abu Dhabi.

Read the rest of New materials; Cerebras to go public; Amkor-TSMC collaboration; advancements in optical communication

Let’s start by briefly mentioning two U.S. CHIPS Act updates. Polar Semiconductor will receive up to $123 million in direct funding to expand and modernize the company’s manufacturing facility in Bloomington, Minnesota. The investment is expected to nearly double the U.S. production capacity of sensor and power chips. The U.S. government has also launched the National Semiconductor Technology Center’s (NSTC) Workforce Center of Excellence (WCoE), with an expected $250 million investment over ten years, to support education programs that address key skills and workforce gaps in the semiconductor industry. The first cohort of awardees consists of the following organizations: American Federation of Teachers Educational Foundation, Idaho Technology Council, Maricopa County Community College District, Rochester Institute of Technology, Texas A&M University, University of California Los Angeles, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Latest EDA updates from TSMC OIP Forum North America

On occasion of TSMC OIP Forum North America, held in Santa Clara on September 25, the major EDA vendors announced their latest tool certifications and new collaborations with the Taiwanese foundry. In general, tool certifications mainly concern TSMC’s N2 process, and areas of collaboration include backside power delivery for the foundry’s A16 process, 3D packaging, multiphysics simulation, IP, cloud-based EDA and more. Here are the announcements from Ansys, Cadence, Siemens and Synopsys. The agenda of the TSMC event, with abstracts of the presentations, can be found here. Below, two charts summarizing the news from Cadence and Synopsys.

Credit: Cadence, TSMC

Credit: Synopsys, TSMC

Read the rest of TSMC-EDA updates; Google’s AI-based chip layout tool; new Altera FPGAs; double-faced GaN wafers

Troubled Intel continues to be in the spotlight, also for the rumors of a gigantic acquisition that analysts deem unlikely. EDA news this week include Synopsys continuing to adjust its market footprint as a consequence of the Ansys acquisition. NAND chips are in the news not just because of new product announcements, but also as a benchmark of China’s manufacturing capabilities in the so-called “chip war” era.

Intel’s CEO message

In a message to Intel employees, company CEO Pat Gelsinger emphasized two recent good news: Intel Foundry will produce an AI fabric chip for AWS using the company’s 18A process – as part of a broader partnership – and Intel as a whole has been awarded up to $3B in direct funding under the CHIPS and Science Act for the U.S. government’s Secure Enclave program, designed to expand the trusted manufacturing of leading-edge semiconductors for the U.S. government. Gelsinger also announced that the company plans to establish Intel Foundry as an independent subsidiary inside of Intel, completing the process initiated earlier this year when the company separated the P&L and financial reporting for Intel Foundry and Intel Products. As for the new fabs, Gelsinger said that the company will pause its projects in Poland and Germany by approximately two years based on anticipated market demand.

According to Reuters, Qualcomm has in recent days approached Intel to explore a potential acquisition of the troubled chipmaker. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon would be personally involved in the negotiations, however the San Diego-based company has not made a formal offer for Intel. The Reuters report points out that it’s not clear how Qualcomm, which has a market value of $188 billion, would finance a bid for Intel, which is valued at $122 billion, including its debt, and how it would handle the takeover of Intel Foundry.

Read the rest of Rumored Qualcomm-Intel deal; Synopsys selling optical group to Keysight; new NAND chips