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.

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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.

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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.

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