According to Reuters, Nvidia is close to becoming the first trillion-dollar chip firm after its stock price increased about 25%, taking the company value to nearly $945 billion. The steep increase happened after Nvidia reportedly projected a quarterly revenue more than 50% above the average Wall Street estimate. “A trillion dollars of installed global data center infrastructure will transition from general purpose to accelerated computing as companies race to apply generative AI into every product, service and business process. (…) We are significantly increasing our supply to meet surging demand for them,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a press release announcing the company’s latest financial results.

AI Generated Silicon Design Challenge

And one of the processes to which generative AI could be applied is chip design, at least according to Efabless which has just announced its “AI Generated Open-Source Silicon Design Challenge”. According to the company, Generative AI offers the potential to revolutionize chip design by automating many of the time-consuming tasks involved in the process. In this challenge, participants will use generative AI (e.g. chatGPT, Bard or similar) to generate Verilog from natural language prompts. Here’s a video example. The designs will then be implemented using the Efabless chipIgnite platform, which includes an SoC template (Caravel) providing rapid chip-level integration, and an open-source RTL-to-GDS digital design flow (OpenLane). Efabless intends to manufacture at least three winning designs.

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Competition heats up for processors aimed at cloud computing. Ampere (Santa Clara, CA) has just introduced a new family of what it calls “cloud native processors”, with 192 custom designed Ampere cores and a number of features aimed at cloud usages like AI. More news this week include innovations from both industry and academia.

New fab investments: Analog Devices in Europe, Micron in Japan

Analog Devices will invest €630 million at its European regional headquarters in Limerick, Ireland, to build a new 45,000 sq-ft R&D and manufacturing facility which will focus on signal processing innovations. The new facility is expected to triple ADI’s European wafer production capacity. The investment is planned as part of a collaboration within the European Union’s Important Projects of Common European Interest on Microelectronics and Communication Technologies (IPCEI ME/CT) initiative, and is supported by the Irish Government. One year ago, Analog Devices announced a separate investment of €100 million in “ADI Catalyst” at its Limerick campus. Ireland is also home to ADI’s main European Research and Development Center.

Micron Technology will be introducing EUV lithography to its Hiroshima (Japan) fab, to manufacture its next generation of DRAM, the 1-gamma (1γ) node. The company expects to ramp EUV into production on the 1-gamma node in Japan (as well as in Taiwan) from 2025 onwards. Micron will be the first semiconductor company to bring EUV technology to Japan for production, and expects to invest up to 500 billion yen in 1-gamma process technology over the next few years, with close support from the Japanese government.

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EDA research is alive: the DAC 2023 technical program received a record high number of submissions. For the Research Track, the Conference’s Technical Program Committee reviewed 1,156 submitted research manuscripts and accepted 263 for presentation and publication. In addition, 269 Engineering Track submissions were reviewed with 71 accepted for presentation.

Hyperscalers updates: Microsoft, Meta, Google

Microsoft and AMD are reportedly collaborating on artificial intelligence chips. Unlike what one would expect, the AI processor design is being provided by Microsoft, not by AMD: it is the Athena chip that was in the news a couple of weeks ago. Microsoft is also reportedly providing financial support to bolster AMD’s AI efforts.

Meta (Facebook) has reportedly hired an Oslo-based team (at least ten engineers) that until late last year was building artificial-intelligence networking technology at British AI chip unicorn Graphcore. According to Reuters, Graphcore closed its Oslo office as part of a broader restructuring announced in October last year.

Among the many innovations introduced on occasion of the recent Google I/O event, Google Cloud has announced the private preview launch of the next-generation A3 GPU supercomputer for training and inference of generative AI and large language models. The A3 VMs combine Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs and Google’s custom-designed 200 Gbps IPUs, with GPU-to-GPU data transfers bypassing the CPU host and flowing over separate interfaces from other VM networks and data traffic. This enables up to 10x more network bandwidth compared to Google’s A2 VMs. The A3 supercomputer’s scale provides up to 26 exaFlops of AI performance.

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Arm has officially started the process that will lead to its IPO on Nasdaq. As stated in a press release, the size and price range for the proposed offering have yet to be determined. Let’s now move to the rest of our weekly news roundup.

Market numbers: semiconductors 1Q2023, EDA 4Q2022

The chip market is slowing down. According to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), worldwide sales of semiconductors totaled $119.5 billion during the first quarter of 2023, a decrease of 8.7% compared to the fourth quarter of 2022 and 21.3% less than the first quarter of 2022. Sales for the month of March 2023, however, increased 0.3% compared to February 2023. The EDA market, in contrast, is doing well. As recently announced by the ESD Alliance, Electronic System Design industry revenue increased 11.3% from $3,468.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2021 to $3,858.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Smartphone chipmakers seeking diversification

In terms of chip demand, one of the market segments that are suffering is smartphones, and this is having an impact on the leading smartphone chip suppliers. Qualcomm’s shares reportedly sank 7%, over the past few days, after the company signalled it would take longer for the smartphone market to rebound from a post-pandemic slump. Qualcomm, however, is diversifying towards automotive and IoT application, and its automotive revenue grew 20% from Q2 2022 to Q2 2023. A similar diversification strategy is being pursued by MediaTek: “We are definitely moving our resources very, very rapidly toward the automotive and computing area because those areas will provide our growth in the next three to five years in the future,” said MediaTek’s CEO Rick Tsai during the 1Q23 earnings call.

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