Catching up on some of the latest news after seasonal holidays – but skipping the CES announcements overload – let’s start by briefly mentioning the recent Risc-V Summit where a Google executive spoke about Google’s support for the porting of Android to Risc-V: here’s the video of the speech.

Accellera to develop a Clock Domain Crossing standard

Accellera has announced the formation of the Clock Domain Crossing (CDC) Working Group, with the goal of defining a standard CDC collateral specification to ease SoC integration. Currently, lack of standard means that different CDC verification tools generate incompatible IP-level CDC collateral. This scenario is causing a CDC verification problem when the SoC teams source IP from IP providers that use a different tool for their own CDC verification.

PDF Solutions and proteanTecs to collaborate on analytics-telemetry solutions

PDF Solutions, a provider of semiconductor data analytics, and proteanTecs, a specialist of on-chip telemetry, have announced a collaboration on combined solutions intended to provide deeper insights on semiconductor yield, quality and reliability. The collaboration includes PDF Solutions’ Exensio Analytics platform, advanced AI/ML models and DEX data exchange network, and proteanTecs’ agents with cloud/edge analytics based on ML-driven chip telemetry. According to the two companies, the combined solutions will deliver unique benefits, such as adaptive test capabilities to further improve test quality and reduce DPPM (defective parts per million), enhanced device quality grading for downstream testing, and more insights around RMAs (return material authorizations) from in-field degradation monitoring.

Read the rest of CDC standard; PDF-proteanTecs collaboration; TSMC 3nm ceremony; new chips for Apple and Dell

Several updates concerning U.S.-China tensions have been in the news over the last few days. Risc-V is another major theme of this news roundup, with product announcements from the recent Risc-V Summit. And one more AI startup is raising the bar for energy efficiency.

Will the ‘chip war’ escalate hitting older nodes?

While export controls on Western technologies have so far focused on the most advanced process nodes, the ‘chip war’ between the U.S. and China could potentially escalate and hit older nodes, according to a TechInsights analyst quoted by Reuters. The premises for this analysis can be found in two press reports: on the one hand, China is reportedly working on a $143 billion support package for its semiconductor industry, to counter U.S. moves aimed at slowing its technological advances; on the other hand, Chinese foundry SMIC is reportedly ramping up production of 28-nanometer chips, an old node still widely used in automotive, weapons and IoT applications. While subsidies would likely benefit Chinese equipment manufacturers – such as Naura, Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment and Kingsemi – the concern of TechInsights is that SMIC and other chipmakers in China could use government subsidies to sell 28-nanometer chips at a low price, flooding this market segment and wiping out global competition.

Read the rest of China reportedly readying semi subsidies; IBM-Rapidus partnership; Risc-V updates; 150 TOPS/W edge AI accelerator

As the industry celebrates the 75th anniversary of the invention of the transistor, geopolitical issues keep making news with Taiwan-headquartered TSMC stepping up its commitment to U.S. fabs. Several updates this week concern technological advancements presented at the IEDM conference.

TSMC to increase its Arizona investment

TSMC has announced that in addition to its Arizona’s first fab, which is scheduled to begin production of N4 process technology in 2024, it has also started the construction of a second fab which is scheduled to begin production of 3-nanometer process technology in 2026. The overall investment for these two fabs will be approximately US$40 billion, representing the largest foreign direct investment in Arizona history and one of the largest foreign direct investments in the history of the United States. TSMC Arizona’s two fabs are expected to directly hire 4,500 employees and, when complete, to manufacture over 600,000 wafers per year. This investment has reportedly sparked concerns in Taiwan, prompting the local government to reassure on TSMC’s commitment to the island. However, according to another report TSMC is planning to move all its 3-nanometer production to the U.S., which would enable Apple to equip its future iPhone 15 models with a new 3-nanometer processor made in the United States.

Read the rest of TSMC in Arizona; IEDM papers; new radar architecture

Will the U.S. ‘CHIPS and Science Act’ benefit fabless companies? As noted by a report just released by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) and the Boston Consulting Group, the recently passed U.S. support plan will provide public funding for semiconductor manufacturing, but not for design. The report finds that a federal investment in semiconductor design and R&D of $20 to $30 billion through 2030 – including a $15 to $20 billion for an investment tax credit for semiconductor design – will help maintain long term U.S. chip design leadership.

Semiconductor capex to drop in 2023 – forecast

Despite the booming demand in early 2022, market research firm IC Insights forecasts a -19% drop in total worldwide semiconductor capital industry spending in 2023, “the steepest decline since the global financial meltdown in 2008-2009.” This forecast already considers the impact of the U.S ‘CHIPS and Science Act’: “IC Insights does not expect a boost to semiconductor capital spending from the $52 billion in grants that will be given to U.S. semiconductor suppliers as part of the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act that was passed earlier this year. Rather, IC Insights believes that most U.S. semiconductor producers that receive this money will use it to replace what they would have spent if not receiving the grant. In other words, the CHIPS and Science Act money is not expected to be ‘additive’ funding to planned semiconductor industry spending, but instead is likely to replace the money a semiconductor producer was going to budget if CHIPS and Science Act funding was unavailable,” the market research firm maintains.

Read the rest of Semi capex to drop in 2023; Synopsys results; MCUs with RRAM; AI learning in the field

This year’s fall edition of the Linley Processor Conference – held on November 1 and 2 in Santa Clara, California – was, as usual, a good observation point to keep abreast of trends and products in neural network acceleration. In this article we will provide a very quick overview of part of the conference, focusing on the keynote given by Linley Gwennap and on the presentations from the companies that addressed AI acceleration topics. The event, of course, offered many more presentations concerning ‘conventional’ (non-AI) processors and other processing-related themes, which we will not cover here.

Linley Gwennap’s keynote: trends in AI acceleration

In his keynote, Linley Gwennap – principal analyst at TechInsights – noted that the growth of AI model size has slowed, as training has become increasingly resource-intensive: for example, training the GPT-3 language processing model takes 1,024 Nvidia A100 GPUs over one month. Rapid growth of AI model size has been enabled by moving training to large processing clusters, but cluster size is topping out for cost reasons: 1,024 GPUs cost approximately $25 million. As a result, essentially there has been no growth in largest trained models over the past year, and recent progress focuses on models with less compute per parameter. Future growth of AI model size will be paced by hardware progress, e.g. the availability of new Nvidia H100 clusters.

Read the rest of AI acceleration trends and updates from the 2022 Linley Fall Processor Conference

Geopolitical tensions keep making headlines, with Japan trying to catch up on advanced nodes capabilities to gain more independence from foreign suppliers. Western world investments in new fabs continue, with Infineon planning for the construction of a factory for 300-millimeter analog/mixed-signal and power semiconductors in Dresden, Germany. More news this week include three interesting academic research works.

Japanese government to subsidize a new domestic chipmaker

As reported by The Japan Times, eight major Japanese companies have jointly invested to launch a new firm, named Rapidus, tasked with developing 2-nanometer chips by 2027, in collaboration with IBM. The eight companies – Toyota, Sony, NTT, SoftBank, Kioxia, Denso, NEC and MUFG Bank – invested a total of ¥7.3 billion ($52 million) to form the new venture, which is chaired by Tetsuro Higashi, former president of chip equipment firm Tokyo Electron. The Japanese government plans to provide the new company with ¥70 billion ($500 million) in subsidies, backed by a second extra budget. Japan will also create a new body for chip research and development called ‘Leading-edge Semiconductor Technology Center’ (LSTC) by the year’s end, consisting of Japan’s major research bodies and universities. Reportedly, analysts are skeptical about the success of Rapidus, as the financial support promised by the Japanese government so far is much smaller than the amounts set out by the U.S. and the European Union for their ‘chips acts’, $52.7 billion and €43 billion ($45 billion) respectively.

Read the rest of Japan’s 2-nm effort; die-to-die interfaces; MediaTek’s activity; 1.53 Pbit/s on fiber; FinFET-based acoustic resonators

Taiwanese foundry TSMC and its collaboration with major EDA partners make up a large part of this week’s news roundup. Other foundries are in the news as well. But first, a quick look at some market data and investment trends.

EDA record revenues

Record numbers are being reported for the Electronic System Design industry: as announced by the ESD Alliance, revenue increased 17.5% from $3,191.4 million in Q2 2021 to $3,748.7 million in Q2 2022. The four-quarter moving average, which compares the most recent four quarters to the prior four, rose 15.3%. As noted by Wally Rhines, the EDA industry in Q2 2022 posted the highest year-over-year increase in over a decade, and all product categories and geographic regions recorded growth in the quarter.

Fab capex reduction

Several chipmakers, however, are cutting their planned capital expenditure citing weaker consumer demand. Among them Taiwanese foundry UMC, which will reportedly reduce its capex by almost a fifth, and South Korean memory maker SK hynix, which has decided to cut its investment next year by more than 50% YoY, citing an unprecedented deterioration of the market conditions in the semiconductor memory industry as uncertainties in the business environment continue.

Read the rest of EDA record revenues; market uncertainties; TSMC’s 3D initiatives; Siemens acquires Avery