A fund backed by the Japanese government has reportedly agreed to buy Japanese photoresists supplier JSR. The deal would represent an additional effort of the Japanese government to revitalize its domestic semiconductor industry. Among the other interesting news this week, Intel implicitly admitting (in this press release) that it is currently spending up to $1.5 billion per year due to operational inefficiencies that its competitors don’t have. This refers to expedited wafers and test times, as explained below.

Intel to adopt an internal “fabless-foundry” model

Intel will adopt a new operating model where its internal product groups will move to a foundry-style relationship with the company’s manufacturing group. In this new “internal foundry” model, Intel’s product business units will engage with the company’s manufacturing group in a similar fashion that fabless semiconductor companies engage with external foundries. Intel’s manufacturing groups will be accountable to a standalone profit and loss (P&L) for the first time. The company expects this change to boost efficiency and therefore deliver significant cost savings. One example concerns “expedited” wafers that business units decide to move through Intel’s manufacturing process, which are costly and reduce factory efficiency. Going forward, this service charge will be borne by the business units, and it’s expected that it will reduce the number of expedites “to be on par with the competition”. Another example concerns Intel’s test times, which currently run “double or triple those of competitors”. As business units are charged market prices based on test time, Intel expects pre-silicon design choices to reduce these test times.

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In view of its upcoming IPO, Arm is reportedly looking for some “anchor investors” among its main customers and end users. Companies in talks with Arm include Intel, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, TSMC, and Samsung. Let’s now move to this week’s news roundup, which mostly concerns EDA and IP. Among the other news, AMD disclosing details about its artificial intelligence products and strategy.

RF EDA updates: Keysight, Xpeedic

Keysight has introduced a new release of its PathWave Advanced Design System. The ADS 2024 suite offers new millimeter wave and subterahertz frequency capabilities targeting 5G and future 6G chips. According to Keysight, 3D electromagnetic analysis can be accelerated thanks to next-generation solvers, application-aware meshing algorithms, and an innovative circuit co-design and simulation approach. Increased circuit designer productivity is achieved through enhancements to the RFPro tool, which streamlines monolithic microwave integrated circuit and module workflows. Performance for microwave power amplifier designs can also be improved thanks to electrothermal simulation, signal modulation, and analysis capabilities. Xpeedic, too, has recently unveiled a new edition of its RF EDA solution. Innovations concern XDS, Xpeedic’s RF system-level design and simulation platform; IRIS, its on-chip passive modeling and simulation tool; and iModeler, a passive model generation tool.

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Updates concerning automotive applications make up a significant part of this week’s news roundup. Among the other themes, backside power delivery is getting closer to real-life applications; and more subsidies are going to benefit the European semiconductor ecosystem.

More European subsidies

In addition to the EU Chips Act, the European Union and some individual member States are going to provide more subsidies to their domestic semiconductor ecosystem. The European Commission has approved an “Important Project of Common European Interest” (‘IPCEI’) to support research, innovation and the first industrial deployment of microelectronics and communication technologies across the value chain. Fourteen member States will provide up to €8.1 billion in public funding, which is expected to unlock additional €13.7 billion in private investments. As part of this IPCEI, 56 companies, including small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups, will undertake 68 projects.

Source: European Commission

Separately, the French government has announced it will provide 2.9 billion euros ($3.10 billion) in state aid to help support an investment of 7.5 billion euros that STMicroelectronics and GlobalFoundries are making to build a semiconductor factory in Crolles, France.

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Open-source software for an open-source ISA: the Risc-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) Project is a new initiative dedicated to enabling a software ecosystem for application processors that includes software development tools, virtualization support, language runtimes, Linux distribution integration, and system firmware, working upstream first with existing open-source communities in accordance with open-source best practices. The RISE Governing Board includes Andes, Google, Intel, Imagination, MediaTek, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Red Hat, Rivos, Samsung, SiFive, T-Head, and Ventana.

New Arm mobile computing platform

At the recent Computex event in Taiwan, Arm announced its Total Compute Solutions 2023 (TCS23), a new platform for mobile computing aimed at premium smartphones. TCS23 IP includes a new Arm Immortalis GPU based on the 5th Generation GPU architecture, a new cluster of Armv9 CPUs supporting artificial intelligence, and other enhancements. A new graphics feature introduced in the 5th Gen GPU architecture is Deferred Vertex Shading (DVS), a technique that redefines the dataflow and enables partners to scale for larger core counts and higher performance points. A key part of the CPU cluster is the new Arm Cortex-X4 – “the fastest CPU that we have ever built,” Arm stated in a blog post – bringing 15 percent more performance compared to the Cortex-X3 while consuming 40 percent less power on the same process. Arm is taping out the Cortex-X4 on the TSMC N3E process.

Cadence will support customers using the new Arm TCS23 through RTL-to-GDS digital flow Rapid Adoption Kits (RAKs) for 3nm and 5nm nodes. The company has fine-tuned its RAKs for Arm Cortex-X4, Cortex-A720 and Cortex-A520 CPUs and Immortalis-G720, Mali-G720 and Mali-G620 GPUs. Cadence verification flow has also been optimized for the newest Arm CPUs and GPUs.

Synopsys, too, has announced support for TCS23 through QuickStart Implementation Kits (QIKs) that are tuned for the latest 5, 4 and 3nm process technologies.

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