Let’s start with an EDA update that is closely related to the so called “chip war” between China and the U.S. According to an article from South China Morning Post, Chinese EDA company Empyrean has ceded control to its largest state-owned shareholder, China Electronics Corporation (CEC). Empyrean’s board of directors granted CEC full control of the company after the EDA firm was put on a U.S. trade blacklist (the “Entity List”). So Chinese state-owned CEC, once a strategic investor, will reportedly consolidate the financial statements of Empyrean into its own and manage the EDA firm as a direct subsidiary.

Rapidus advancements: process, equipment, EDA collaborations

Recently established Japanese foundry Rapidus has announced several steps towards becoming operational with its 2-nanometer GAA process. Working in partnership, IBM and Rapidus have achieved the capability of building nanosheet gate-all-around transistors with multiple threshold voltages (or multi-Vt), which enable ultra-low threshold voltages for high-performance computing, and higher threshold voltages for low-power computing. The two companies believe Rapidus will be able to produce these chips before the end of this decade. Details of the challenges and solutions can be found here.

Additionally, Rapidus has received and installed an ASML’s EUV lithography equipment at its fab currently under construction in Chitose, Hokkaido, which will be used for the 2-nanometer gate-all-around (GAA) manufacturing. According to the company, this is the first time that an EUV lithography tool will be used for mass production in Japan.

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Let’s start with a recent press leak: in a bid to win European Union approval of its Ansys acquisition, Synopsys has reportedly offered to sell its Optical Solutions Group to Keysight and also to divest Ansys PowerArtist.

Science meets AI at NeurIPS

Interestingly, artificial intelligence in its current form – which is based on neural networks – is probably the only example of a thriving industry built on a technology that does not have a clear, well defined scientific basis. Neural networks deliver amazing performance, spark the construction of gigantic datacenters, move enormous capitals – still, scientists don’t have a full grasp of what happens inside them. A workshop taking place at the NeurIPS conference – currently running in Vancouver – will address this topic. “While deep learning continues to achieve impressive results on an ever-growing range of tasks, our understanding of the principles underlying these successes remains largely limited,” the workshop organizers wrote in an abstract. “This problem is usually tackled from a mathematical point of view, aiming to prove rigorous theorems about optimization or generalization errors of standard algorithms, but so far they have been limited to overly-simplified settings.” According to these scientists, the “scientific method” in the study of neural networks “has been largely underexplored”. The scientific method, they explain, enables the “empirical analyses of deep networks that can validate or falsify existing theories and assumptions, or answer questions about the success or failure of these models.”

TSMC reportedly in talks for Nvidia Blackwell production in Arizona

TSMC is reportedly in discussions with Nvidia to produce the Blackwell AI chips at the foundry’s new plant in Arizona. Blackwell chips have so far been manufactured at TSMC’s facilities in Taiwan. However, even if produced in Arizona the chips will still need to be shipped to Taiwan for packaging, as the Arizona facility reportedly does not have CoWoS capacity.

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The unexpected retirement of Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger is clearly this week’s major event, and the December 2 announcement spurred a flurry of analysis, comments and backstories. According to Reuters, Gelsinger was forced out after a meeting when the company board told him that he could retire or be removed. Reportedly, the Intel board lost confidence in Gelsinger’s costly and ambitious plan to transform Intel, as the progress of change was not fast enough. In other words, the board holds Gelsinger responsible for Intel’s recent disappointing results: the reduction of its market capitalization (the Intel stock reportedly lost more than 60% under Gelsinger’s tenure), the significant growth of its capital expenditure, and the troubles still affecting its new Foundry business. A summary of the company’s financial performance, with charts, can be found here.

The outcome of Gelsinger’s attempt to transform Intel begs questions about his IDM 2.0 strategy, a plan which could arguably be summarized as follows: in a few years, making Intel able to compete on par with both Nvidia and TSMC. Was this goal too ambitious and unrealistic? Or was the financial market not patient enough to wait for a feasible strategy to be fully implemented? And, assuming Gelsinger’s strategy was theoretically feasible, was its practical implementation hindered by Intel’s limited “ability to execute”, to use a Gartner term? If so, organizational inefficiencies may have played a role in delaying positive results. Former Cadence CEO Lip-Bu Tan quit the Intel board last August criticizing not just Gelsinger’s strategy, but reportedly complaining about Intel’s “bloated workforce”, its “risk-averse and bureaucratic culture”, saying he believed Intel was “overrun by bureaucratic layers of middle managers who impeded progress at Intel’s server and desktop chips divisions.” And Intel candidly admitted other inefficiencies in June 2023 when it adopted the “internal foundry model”: namely, an excessive use of “expedited” wafers that business units decide to move through Intel’s manufacturing process, which are costly and reduce factory efficiency, and Intel’s test times, which ran “double or triple those of competitors”.

The next Intel CEO, whoever he or she will be, will have to decide not just whether to continue or discard Gelsinger’s IDM 2.0 strategy, but also how to deal with Intel’s inefficiencies – part of which arguably still exist, even though Gelsinger has gone. (By the way: searching for a new CEO, Intel has reportedly approached the above mentioned Lip-Bu Tan, among others). And, as for the future of Intel Foundry, he or she will face an additional complication: reportedly, the company has said that its recent deal for $7.86 billion in U.S. government subsidies restricts its ability to sell stakes in its foundry unit if it becomes an independent entity.

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