China news; Cadence Sigrity X; DARPA initiatives; AI in process control; Northvolt-Volkswagen deal

News from the rapidly evolving Chinese semiconductor industry open our roundup this week. More updates span across EDA, U.S. defense research, chip manufacturing, and electric vehicles.

China semiconductors updates: Baidu, ByteDance, CSIA

Chinese Internet giant Baidu has reportedly said that its artificial intelligence chip unit Kunlun has recently completed a fundraising round, which values the business at about $2 billion. According to the same source, Baidu is considering commercializing its AI chip design capabilities, with the aim of making the Kunlun unit a standalone company.

Another important Chinese Internet player, ByteDance, has reportedly begun hiring employees for semiconductor-related job openings. The company – best known for its TikTok app – confirmed it is exploring initiatives in this area, including the development of Arm-based server chips. According to another press report, ByteDance has also established a team to explore the development of artificial intelligence chips.

Semiconductor-related initiatives from companies like Baidu and ByteDance fit into a context where the Chinese government is playing an important role. During the recent National People’s Congress, the government reportedly committed to boost spending and research in advanced chips and artificial intelligence, to reduce reliance on foreign technologies.

In fact – as noted by market research firm IC Insights – despite being the largest consuming country for ICs since 2005, China still holds a small share as a producer. Of the $143.4 billion worth of ICs sold in China in 2020, only 15.9% was produced in China. Of that amount, China-headquartered companies produced only 5.9%.

Despite this scenario of increased international competition, the U.S. and Chinese industry groups have launched a collaboration initiative. The China Semiconductor Industry Association (CSIA) reportedly said in a recent statement on its website that it will form a working group with the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). According to the statement, ten chip companies from each nation will meet twice a year to discuss topics ranging from export policies to supply-chain safety and encryption technology.

EDA update: Cadence Sigrity X

Cadence has unveiled its new Sigrity X signal and power integrity (SI/PI) solutions, featuring new simulation engines for system-level analysis and including the massively distributed architecture of the Clarity 3D Solver. According to the company, Sigrity X delivers up to a 10X performance gain for simulation speed and design capacity, and also provides a new user interface that streamlines setup time. The announcement includes endorsements from MediaTek, Renesas, Samsung, and H3C Semiconductor.

Lattice and Quicklogic join DARPA Toolbox Initiative

The Toolbox Initiative from DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has recently gained two new partners from the FPGA industry. Lattice has provided its Diamond and Radiant FPGA design tools, and has granted access to a selection of its most popular soft IP cores and technical support. Quicklogic, for its part, will supply its embedded FPGA IP and open source FPGA development tools. DARPA Toolbox is an effort to provide open licensing opportunities with commercial technology vendors to the researchers behind DARPA programs. The initiative aims to provide easy, low-cost, scalable access to state-of-the-art tools and intellectual property under predictable legal terms and streamlined acquisition procedures. The goal is to reduce researchers’ reliance on low-quality, low-cost tools and IP that increase execution risks and complicate post-DARPA transitions. Other current Toolbox suppliers include Arm, CEVA, Flex Logix, Rambus, SecureIC and Verific Design Automation.

Credit: DARPA

DARPA is in the news these days also for its program on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), a technology that enables computation on encrypted information – without prior decryption. FHE is currently requiring a prohibitive amount of compute power and time. The DARPA program, called DPRIVE (Data Protection in Virtual Environments) seeks to develop a hardware accelerator for FHE computations capable of dramatically reducing the compute runtime compared to software-based FHE approaches. The agency has recently announced the four research teams selected to the DPRIVE program, which will be led by Duality Technologies, Galois, SRI International, and Intel Federal respectively.

Applied Materials innovates wafer process control with Big Data and AI

Applied Materials has introduced a new wafer process control solution consisting of three elements working together in real time: 1) the new Enlight Optical Wafer Inspection System, which – according to the company – provides a 3x reduction in the cost of capturing critical defects as compared to competing approaches, thereby allowing the insertion of many more inspection points, resulting in the availability of Big Data; 2) the new ExtractAI technology which uses artificial intelligence to distinguish yield-killing defects from the millions of nuisance signals or “noise” generated by high-end optical scanners, with the claimed ability of characterizing all the potential defects on the wafer map after reviewing only 0.001% of the samples; 3) the existing SEMVision eBeam Review System, which trains the Enlight system with ExtractAI technology to classify yield-killing defects and distinguish defects from noise. The installed base of SEMVision G7 systems is already compatible with the new Enlight system and ExtractAI technology. According to Applied Materials, this new playbook for process control accelerates chipmakers’ time to maximum yield, enabling them to ramp new process nodes faster and maintain high capture rates of yield-critical defects over the lifetime of the process.

Credit: Applied Materials

Northvolt receives $14 billion battery order from Volkswagen

Swedish battery startup Northvolt has received a $14 billion order over the next ten years as it has been selected as a strategic lead supplier for premium battery cells for Volkswagen Group in Europe. The partnership will be centered around Northvolt’s gigafactory in Sweden, which will be expanded to achieve further economies of scale, reduced complexity and a better environmental footprint for the product. Volkswagen will at the same time increase its ownership in Northvolt. According to a Bloomberg report, Northvolt will be as indispensable to Volkswagen over the next decade as Panasonic has been to Tesla over the last one. The report also describes the deal as “a huge show of confidence in a company [Northvolt] that hasn’t yet started production.”

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