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

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.

New “universal processor” does not use the Tomasulo algorithm

“Our Universal Processor does it all – CPU, GPU, DSP, FPGA – in one chip, one architecture,” says Hyun Shin Cho, CEO of Germany-headquartered Ubitium, in a press release. Based on the Risc-V ISA, Ubitium’s processor does not use the Tomasulo algorithm, the instruction scheduling scheme that – since 1967 – enables out-of-order execution. Instead, the company claims, the new architecture eliminates unproductive housekeeping and maximizes instruction execution, eliminating hardware overhead for simultaneous multi-threading and instantaneously reconfiguring an array for data-flow processing. According to Ubitium, this “workload-agnostic” processor eliminates the need for multiple specialized cores and enables artificial intelligence at no additional cost in edge applications.

SK hynix starts mass production of 321-layer NAND Flash memory

SK hynix has started mass production of the world’s first triple level cell-based 321-high 4D NAND Flash memory with 1Tb capacity. Availability of the new product is expected from the first half of next year. The company broke the 300 layers barrier by adopting the “3 plugs” process technology, developing a low-stress material, and introducing a technology that automatically corrects alignments among the plugs. Switching from the 238-high NAND to the 321-high product, the company could also improve productivity by 59%.

Eliyan’s NuLink on a Samsung’s 4nm process

Eliyan has announced the successful tape out of its NuLink PHY in a x64 UCIe Advanced Package Module on Samsung Foundry’s SF4X 4-nanometer manufacturing process. The interconnect solution supports up to 40Gbps bandwidth at “unprecedented” power levels. It utilizes advanced packaging micro bumps at 45-micron pitch and is fully compatible with the UCIe standard. Eliyan will use the technology for building its custom High Bandwidth Memory base dies and offer it as IP to enable ASIC disaggregation approaches that leverage chiplets.

SMIC’s N+2 yield reportedly around 20%

When commenting SMIC’s capabilities to reach advanced nodes without Western equipment, the analysts who cover this major Chinese foundry have always pointed out that a key metric was missing: manufacturing yield. Now a press report sheds some light on this point. According to Reuters, Huawei’s Ascend 910C chip is being made by SMIC on its N+2 process, but a lack of advanced lithography equipment has limited the yield to around 20%. Despite this low yield, Huawei is reportedly planning to start mass-producing its most advanced artificial intelligence chip in the first quarter of 2025.

Upcoming events

The 2024 edition of IEDM – IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting – will take place in San Francisco from December 7 to 11. Among the innovations that will be discussed by the speakers, an industry-leading 2nm CMOS logic platform, from TSMC; extremely scaled nanosheet transistors, from Intel; scaled 4F2 DRAM with new vertical channel transistors, from Kioxia/Nanya; dense, fast, energy-efficient 3D chip for computing-in-memory, from Tsinghua University; AI simulations to predict troublesome heating, from DeepSim/UC-Davis/Stanford; an integrated image sensor for both color imaging and gauging distance, from Sony; novel power device operating at 250°C, from Virginia Tech/Naval Research Lab/Novel Crystal Technology. Five Focus Sessions will address the following topics: AI memory technology and architecture; emerging neural interface technologies for human interfacing; leading semiconductor products and advanced packaging; semiconductor technology’s biggest and best innovations; emerging power electronic devices and integration for a sustainable society.

Further reading – and listening

A new generative AI model from Nvidia can generate or transform any mix of music, voices and sounds described with prompts using any combination of text and audio files. For example, it can create a music snippet based on a text prompt, remove or add instruments from an existing song, change the accent or emotion in a voice, extract the singer’s voice from a song etc. Some samples are available in this video.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 27th, 2024 at 7:12 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.