Infineon has introduced the world’s first 300mm Gallium Nitride (GaN) wafer, paving the way for mass production of GaN-based power semiconductors. A 300mm wafer contains 2.3 times more chips than a 200mm wafer.
Figure 1: Infineon’s 300mm GaN wafer. Source: Infineon
The Semiconductor Industry Association released its 2024 State of the U.S. Semiconductor Industry report this week, highlighting growth opportunities, current and emerging challenges, and interesting metrics.
Samsung has begun mass production of 1Tb quad-level vertical NAND (V-NAND).
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has proposed reporting requirements for AI developers and cloud providers, including on development activities such as testing their ability to support cyber attacks and lowering the barriers of entry for non-experts to develop chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons, as well as cybersecurity measures and the results of red team training.
Special Report: Growing Defect Challenges at Wafer Edge: Improving measurement accuracy of edge defects can improve yield while preventing catastrophic wafer breakage, but the number of potential defects is increasing.
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global
According to AZ Central, Hyperion plans to build a 600,000-square-foot facility in Peoria, Arizona, to manufacture high-density interconnect IC substrates.
According to Bloomberg, Intel’s US Chips Act funding could be delayed unless its performance meets pre-agreed expectations.
Polymatech and ECM Group are establishing a joint venture in Grenoble, France for semiconductor wafer manufacturing, focusing on sapphire ingots and wafers.
Move2THz, a 27-member EU consortium led by Soitec, aims to develop the next generation of radio frequency semiconductors based on indium phosphide.
Amazon Web Services plans to invest more than $10 billion in building and operating new data centers in the UK over the next five years.
According to TECHCET, China’s expanding export controls are of growing concern to the semiconductor industry, especially in the areas of graphite, germanium and rare earth elements. The recent antimony export controls will force the US to secure supply sources outside of China. Nikkei Asia also analyzed how the upcoming US presidential elections will affect US sanctions against China.
Meanwhile, Huawei has launched a tri-fold phone equipped with a SMIC chip.
Brooks Instrument has opened a new manufacturing facility in Malaysia to produce mass flow controllers.
detail
Semiconductor Engineering published its “Low Power, High Performance” newsletter this week, featuring the following top stories:
Additionally, the company’s Test, Measurement & Analysis newsletter featured reports such as:
This week’s conferences
India’s semiconductor industry is booming, buoyed by the excitement surrounding SEMICON India.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke at a conference this week, pledging his government’s efforts to strengthen the sector. SEMI announced a new workforce development program and inked an agreement with IESA, the leading trade group representing India’s semiconductor industry. India’s L&T Semiconductor Technologies is working with IBM on research and development to design advanced processors. The U.S. State Department is partnering with the Indian government and others under the ITSI Fund, established by the CHIPS Act, to expand and diversify the global semiconductor ecosystem. NXP CEO Kurt Sievers has pledged to invest more than $1 billion in India and double its research and development efforts.
Apple made several announcements at its September event.
The iPhone 16 is powered by Apple’s A18 chip based on Arm’s V9 cores, with enhanced AI capabilities. The much thinner Apple Watch Series 10 has 18 hours of battery life with faster charging, a SiP with a 4-core Neural Engine, a brighter and larger wide-angle OLED display, and sleep apnea alerts. AirPods 4 offer USB-C charging and 24 hours of battery life, and AirPods Pro 2 have clinical-grade hearing aid capabilities.
The AI Hardware & Edge AI Summit has been a launching pad for many startups and established companies.
Enfabrica’s SuperNIC AI solution (right) and Positron.ai’s Transformer Inference Device (left) presented at the AI Hardware & Edge AI Summit. Photo: Semiconductor Engineering
money
IDC expects worldwide spending on edge computing to reach $378 billion by 2028. “As AI’s focus shifts from training to inference, edge computing must address the need for reduced latency and increased privacy,” IDC research vice president Dave McCarthy said in the release.
According to Yole, the global power electronics market, including discrete devices and modules, is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 7% between 2023 and 2029, reaching USD 35.7 billion in 2029.
According to Yole, the SiC device market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 24% from 2023 to 2029, reaching approximately US$10 billion by 2029, with major companies focusing on the transition to 8-inch wafers.
According to TrendForce, NAND flash shipment growth slowed in the second quarter of 2024, but revenue grew 14%, driven by demand for AI SSDs.
U.S. Department of Energy:
$65 million in quantum computing funding awarded to 10 projects focused on end-to-end software toolchains; 91 early-career scientists from across the country selected to receive a total of $138 million in research funding in AI, fusion energy, and quantum; The Office of Science announced a $23 million research and development opportunity led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to develop the supercomputer of the future.
Products and Standards
JEDEC has published a new standard to address switching energy losses in wide bandgap and silicon power devices.
Synopsys unveiled its ImSym Imaging System Simulator, a virtual prototype of imaging systems, sensors and image signal processors, powered by CODE V and LightTools optical design software. The company also unveiled a complete UCIe IP solution operating at up to 40 Gbps per pin to address the growing computing performance demands of AI data centers.
Rambus has released its HBM4 memory controller IP for cutting-edge AI accelerators, graphics and HPC applications. The controller supports 6.4 Gbps per JEDEC specification, providing 2.56 TB/s throughput to each memory device.
Infineon has launched its StrongIRFET 2 power MOSFET 30 V portfolio for applications such as industrial switched-mode power supplies (SMPS), motor drives, battery-powered applications, battery management systems and uninterruptible power supplies.
Bruker has introduced the Dektak ProTM stylus profilometer, the next generation profiler in its Dektak product line. This new benchtop system expands the measurement area up to 200mm full sample access for semiconductor applications, delivering faster time to results and improved accuracy.
VeriSilicon has licensed Arteris’ FlexNoC 5 interconnect IP, which the company says will be used to optimize NoC interconnect logic and physical layout to enable efficient chip designs.
Tenstorrent has licensed Movellus’ digital IP products for AI and HPC chiplet solutions.
Education and Training
Axiomise has launched a new “Basic Introduction to Hands-on Formal Verification” training program. The course, taught by company founder Ashish Darbari, focuses on the use of SystemVerilog assertions in real-world design challenges.
Stanford University’s School of Engineering will collaborate with TSMC to renovate and expand the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility.
The University of California, Santa Barbara and Santa Barbara City College have partnered to expand workforce pathways in micro/nanotechnology and semiconductor manufacturing by providing SBCC students access to cleanroom training at UCSB. The program is supported by the NSF’s Undergraduate Education Division’s Advanced Technical Education Program and Intel.
Coe College received a $225,000 grant from NASA to purchase an HPC cluster with 1,024 CPU cores and eight NVIDIA RTX 600 ADA GPUs, an advanced cooling system, and software including COMSOL Multiphysics with a plasma module. The goal is to provide students and faculty with the tools for physics, data analysis, and engineering capabilities.
safety
Finland’s Xiphera has announced a project to develop quantum-resistant authenticated boot and hardware root of trust for space-grade chip architectures.
Recent Security Research:
Obsidian: Collaborative State Space Exploration for High Performance Inference on Secure ML Accelerators (UT Austin, Arm) Bridging the Gap: Leaking Contracts for Transition and Glitchy Processors (TU Graz) Robust Deep Learning Attack Resistant MRAM-Based Physically Unclonable Functions (Shahid Beheshti Univ., George Washington Univ., Univ. de Sherbrooke) Password-Protected Key Acquisition with (and without) HSM Protection (IBM Research Europe, ETH Zurich, Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Hasso Plattner Institute) TrojanForge: Generating Adversarial Hardware Trojan Examples Using Reinforcement Learning (New Mexico State Univ., Miami Univ., North Carolina A&T State Univ.)
Aliro will provide software and expert services to the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to enable AFRL to simulate, test and operate entanglement-based quantum network infrastructure, including heterogeneous qubit platforms.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued several warnings/advisories.
Cars and batteries
As part of the EEmotion project, co-funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Action, the ZF Group and Infineon have jointly developed and implemented AI algorithms to optimize driving dynamics software and control units. Infineon’s AURIX TC4x MCUs enable the AI algorithms thanks to their parallel processing units (PPUs).
Honda has invested an undisclosed amount in SiLC to develop next-generation FMCW LiDAR solutions for all types of mobility. (For more information on LiDAR, check out this latest report.)
The increasing electrification of everyday items is driving a proliferation of batteries and their continued development for use in vehicles and power grids. Safety and energy density are the primary motivations for researchers looking to improve lithium batteries.
China has developed the technology to access new mineral resources for EV batteries, starting with Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.
quantum
IonQ and the University of Maryland have entered into a $9 million partnership to provide access to quantum computing at the Maryland National Quantum Laboratory (QLab) and enable affiliate students, faculty, researchers, staff and partners to collaborate with IonQ scientists and engineers.
Quantinuum has announced a roadmap to achieve universal, fully fault-tolerant quantum computing by 2030.
IonQ announced that the fidelity of a two-qubit gate on one of its Barium development platforms exceeded 99.9%, a breakthrough the company said will enable it to identify and eliminate error mechanisms in large-scale quantum systems.
Israel-based Quantum Source raises $50 million in Series A funding for scalable, useful quantum computing.
Events and Resources
Find upcoming chip industry events here.
Event Date Location SNUG Israel September 17 Herzliya, Israel TSMC 2024 NA OIP Ecosystem Forum September 25 Santa Clara, CA GSA Executive Forum September 26 Menlo Park, CA SPIE Photomask Technology + EUVL September 29 – October 3 Monterey, CA Strategic Materials Conference: SMC 2024 September 30 – October 2 San Jose, CA IMAPS 2024: International Symposium on Microelectronics October 1 – October 3 Boston, MA Rambus Design Summit October 1 Virtual Memory Users Conference October 1 – 2 Virtual 2024 IEEE Electronic Design Process Symposium (EDPS) October 3 – 4 SEMI Facility, Milpitas, CA Chip Packaging with CHIPS: West Coast Summit October 17th Hardwear.io Conference & Training October 21-25th Amsterdam, Netherlands CadenceCONNECT: Jasper Users Group October 22-23rd San Jose, CA NSTC Symposium and Microelectronics Commons Annual Conference October 28-30th Washington, DC See all upcoming events here
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