President Biden will raise the tariff rate on Chinese semiconductors from 25% to 50% by 2025, among other measures to protect U.S. businesses from China’s trade practices. Also, as part of President Biden’s AI Executive Order, the Administration released steps to protect workers from AI risks, including human oversight of systems and transparency about what systems are being used.

Intel is in advanced talks with Apollo Global Management for the equity firm to provide more than $11 billion to build a fab in Ireland, reported the Wall Street Journal. Also, Intel’s Foundry Services appointed Kevin O’Buckley as the senior vice president and general manager.

Polar is slated to receive up to $120 million in CHIPS Act funding to establish an independent American foundry in Minnesota. The company expects to invest about $525 million in the expansion of the facility over the next two years, with a $75 million investment from the State of Minnesota.

Arm plans to develop AI chips for launch next year, reports Nikkei Asia.

South Korea is planning a support package worth more than 10 trillion won ($7.3 billion) aimed at chip materials, equipment makers, and fabless companies throughout the semiconductor supply chain, according to Reuters.

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Global

Edwards opened a new facility in Asan City, South Korea. The 15,000m² factory provides a key production site for abatement systems, and integrated vacuum and abatement systems for semiconductor manufacturing.

France’s courtship with mega-tech is paying off.  Microsoft is investing more than US $4 billion to expand its cloud computing and AI infrastructure, including bringing up to 25,000 advanced GPUs to the country by the end of 2025. The “Choose France” campaign also snagged US $1.3 billion from Amazon for cloud infrastructure expansion, genAI and more.

Toyota, Nissan, and Honda are teaming up on AI and chips for next-gen cars with support from Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, (METI), reports Nikkei Asia.

Meanwhile, IBM and Honda are collaborating on long-term R&D of next-gen technologies for software-defined vehicles (SDV), including chiplets, brain-inspired computing, and hardware-software co-optimization.

Siemens and Foxconn plan to collaborate on global manufacturing processes in electronics, information and communications technology, and electric vehicles (EV).

TSMC confirmed a Q424 construction start date for its first European plant in Dresden, Germany.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to invest €7.8 billion (~$8.4B) in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud in Germany through 2040. The system is designed to serve public sector organizations and customers in highly regulated industries.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Low Power-High Performance newsletter this week, featuring these stories:

• • Will Domain-Specific ICs Become Ubiquitous?
  • Running More Efficient AI/ML Code With Neuromorphic Engines
  • Power/Performance Costs In Chip Security

And this week’s Test, Measurement & Analytics newsletter featured these stories:

• Using Predictive Maintenance To Boost IC Manufacturing Efficiency
• The Future Of Fault Coverage In Chips
• Doing More At Functional Test

Markets and Money

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) awarded more than $1.2 million to 12 businesses in 8 states under the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program to fund R&D of products relating to cybersecurity, quantum computing, health care, semiconductor manufacturing, and other critical areas.

Engineering services and consulting company Infosys completed the acquisition of InSemi Technology, a provider of semiconductor design and embedded software development services.

The quantum market, which includes quantum networking and sensors alongside computing, is predicted to grow from $838 million in 2024 to $1.8 billion in 2029, reports Yole.

Shipments of OLED monitors reached about 200,000 units in Q1 2024, a year over year growth of 121%, reports TrendForce.

Global EV sales grew 18% in Q1 2024 with plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) sales seeing 46% YoY growth and battery electric vehicle (BEV) sales growing just 7%, according to Counterpoint. China leads global EV sales with 28% YoY growth, while the US grew just 2%. Tesla saw a 9% YoY drop, but topped BEV sales with a 19% market share. BYD grew 13% YoY and exported about 100,000 EVs with 152% YoY growth, mainly in Southeast Asia.

DeepX raised $80.5 million in Series C funding for its on-device NPU IP and AI SoCs tailored for applications including physical security, robotics, and mobility.

MetisX raised $44 million in Series A funding for its memory solutions built on Compute Express Link (CXL) for accelerating large-scale data processing applications.

Security

While security experts have been warning of a growing threat in electronics for decades, there have been several recent fundamental changes that elevate the risk.

Synopsys and the Ponemon Institute released a report showing 54% of surveyed organizations suffered a software supply chain attack in the past year and 20% were not effective in their response. And 52% said their development teams use AI tools to generate code, but only 32% have processes to evaluate it for license, security, and quality risks.

Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum and TU Darmstadt presented a solution for the automated generation of fault-resistant circuits (AGEFA) and assessed the security of examples generated by AGEFA against side-channel analysis and fault injection.

TXOne reported on operational technology security and the most effective method for preventing production interruptions caused by cyber-attacks.

CrowdStrike and NVIDIA are collaborating to accelerate the use of analytics and AI in cybersecurity to help security teams combat modern cyberattacks, including AI-powered threats.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finalized its guidelines for protecting sensitive data, known as controlled unclassified information, aimed at organizations that do business with the federal government.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded BAE Systems a $12 million contract to solve thermal challenges limiting electronic warfare systems, particularly in GaN transistors.

Sigma Defense won a $4.7 million contract from the U.S. Army for an AI-powered virtual training environment, partnering with Brightline Interactive on a system that uses spatial computing and augmented intelligence workflows.

SkyWater’s advanced packaging operation in Florida has been accredited as a Category 1A Trusted Supplier by the Defense Microelectronics Activity (DMEA) of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

Videos of two CWE-focused sessions from CVE/FIRST VulnCon 2024 were made available on the CWE YouTube Channel.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a number of alerts/advisories.

Supercomputing

Supercomputers are battling for top dog.

The Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) retained the top spot on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest systems with an HPL score of 1.206 EFlop/s. The as-yet incomplete Aurora system at Argonne took second place, becoming the world’s second exascale system at 1.012 EFlop/s. The Green500 list, which tracks energy efficiency of compute, saw three new entrants take the top places.

Cerebras Systems, Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory used Cerebras’ second generation Wafer Scale Engine to perform atomic scale molecular dynamics simulations at the millisecond scale, which they claim is 179X faster than the Frontier supercomputer.

UT Austin‘s Stampede3 Supercomputer is now in full production, serving the open science community through 2029.

Education and Training

SEMI announced the SEMI University Semiconductor Certification Programs to help alleviate the workforce skills gap. Its first two online courses are designed for new talent seeking careers in the industry, and experienced workers looking to keep their skills current.  Also, SEMI and other partners launched a European Chip Skills Academy Summer School in Italy.

Siemens created an industry credential program for engineering students that supplements a formal degree by validating industry knowledge and skills. Nonprofit agency ABET will provide accreditation. The first two courses are live at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and a series is planned with Pennsylvania State University (Penn State).

Syracuse University launched a $20 million Center for Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing, with co-funding from Onondaga County.

Starting young is a good thing.  An Arizona school district, along with the University Of Arizona,  is creating a semiconductor program for high schoolers.

Product News

Siemens and Sony partnered to enable immersive engineering via a spatial content creation system, NX Immersive Designer, which includes Sony’s XR head-mounted display. The integration of hardware and software gives designers and engineers natural ways to interact with a digital twin. Siemens also extended its Xcelerator as a Service portfolio with solutions for product engineering and lifecycle management, cloud-based high-performance simulation, and manufacturing operations management. It will be available on Microsoft Azure, as well.

Advantest announced the newest addition to its portfolio of power supplies for the V93000 EXA Scale SoC test platform. The DC Scale XHC32 power supply offers 32 channels with single-instrument total current of up to 640A.

Fig. 1: Advantest’s DC Scale XHC32. Source: Advantest

Infineon released its XENSIV TLE49SR angle sensors, which can withstand stray magnetic fields of up to 8 mT, ideal for applications of safety-critical automotive chassis systems.

Google debuted its sixth generation Cloud TPU, 4.7X faster and 67% more energy-efficient than the previous generation, with double the high-bandwidth memory.

X-Silicon uncorked a RISC-V vector CPU, coupled with a Vulkan-enabled GPU ISA and AI/ML acceleration in a single processor core, aimed at embedded and IoT applications.

IBM expanded its Qiskit quantum software stack, including the stable release of its SDK for building, optimizing, and visualizing quantum circuits.

Northeastern University announced the general availability of testing and integration solutions for Open RAN through the Open6G Open Testing and Integration Center (Open 6G OTIC).

Research

The University of Glasgow received £3 million (~$3.8M) from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)’s Strategic Equipment Grant scheme to help establish “Analogue,” an Automated Nano Analysing, Characterisation and Additive Packaging Suite to research silicon chip integration and packaging.

EPFL researchers developed scalable photonic ICs, based on lithium tantalate.

DISCO developed a way to increase the diameter of diamond wafers that uses the KABRA process, a laser ingot slicing method.

CEA-Leti developed two complementary approaches for high performance photon detectors — a mercury cadmium telluride-based avalanche photodetector and a superconducting single photon detector.

Toshiba demonstrated storage capacities of over 30TB with two next-gen large capacity recording technologies for hard disk drives (HDDs): Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR).

Caltech neuroscientists reported that their brain-machine interface (BMI) worked successfully in a second human patient, following 2022’s first instance, proving the device is not dependent on one particular brain or one location in a brain.

Linköping University researchers developed a cheap, sustainable battery made from zinc and lignin, while ORNL researchers developed carbon-capture batteries.

Events and Further Reading

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Upcoming webinars are here.

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The post Chip Industry Week In Review appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

The idea of powering civilization from gigantic solar plants in orbit is older than any space program, but despite seven decades of rocket science, the concept—to gather near-constant sunlight tens of thousands of kilometers above the equator, beam it to Earth as microwaves, and convert it to electricity—still remains tantalizingly over the horizon. Several recently published deep-dive analyses commissioned by NASA and the European Space Agency have thrown cold water on the hope that space solar power could affordably generate many gigawatts of clean energy in the near future. And yet the dream lives on.

The dream achieved a kind of lift-off in January 2023. That’s when SSPD-1, a solar space-power demonstrator satellite carrying a bevy of new technologies designed at the California Institute of Technology, blasted into low Earth orbit for a year-long mission. Mindful of concerns about the technical feasibility of robotic in-space assembly of satellites, each an order of magnitude larger than the International Space Station, the Caltech team has been looking at very different approaches to space solar power.

For an update on what the SSPD-1 mission achieved and how it will shape future concepts for space solar-power satellites, IEEE Spectrum spoke with Ali Hajimiri, an IEEE Fellow, professor of electrical engineering at Caltech, and codirector of the school’s space-based solar power project. The interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

SSPD-1 flew with several different testbeds. Let’s start with the MAPLE (Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment) testbed for wireless power transmission: When you and your team went up on the roof of your building on campus in May 2023 and aimed your antennas to where the satellite was passing over, did your equipment pick up actual power being beamed down or just a diagnostic signal?

Ali Hajimiri is the codirector of Caltech’s space-based solar power project.Caltech

Ali Hajimiri: I would call it a detection. The primary purpose of the MAPLE experiment was to demonstrate wireless energy transfer in space using flexible, lightweight structures and also standard CMOS integrated circuits. On one side are the antennas that transmit the power, and on the flip side are our custom CMOS chips that are part of the power-transfer electronics. The point of these things is to be very lightweight, to reduce the cost of launch into space, and to be very flexible for storage and deployment, because we want to wrap it and unwrap it like a sail.

I see—wrap them up to fit inside a rocket and then unwrap and stretch them flat once they are released into orbit.

Hajimiri: MAPLE’s primary objective was to demonstrate that these flimsy-looking arrays and CMOS integrated circuits can operate in space. And not only that, but that they can steer wireless energy transfer to different targets in space, different receivers. And by energy transfer I mean net power out at the receiver side. We did demonstrate power transfer in space, and we made a lot of measurements. We are writing up the details now and will publish those results.

The second part of this experiment—really a stretch goal—was to demonstrate that ability to point the beam to the right place on Earth and see whether we picked up the expected power levels. Now, the larger the transmission array is in space, the greater the ability to focus the energy to a smaller spot on the ground.

Right, because diffraction of the beam limits the size of the spot, as a function of the transmitter size and the frequency of the microwaves.

Hajimiri: Yes. The array we had in space for MAPLE was very small. As a result, the transmitter spread the power over a very large area. So we captured a very small fraction of the energy—that’s why I call it a detection; it was not net positive power. But we measured it. We wanted to see: Do we get what we predict from our calculations? And we found it was in the right range of power levels we expected from an experiment like that.

So, comparable in power to the signals that come down in standard communication satellite operations.

Hajimiri: But done using this flexible, lightweight system—that’s what makes it better. You can imagine developing the next generation of communication satellites or space-based sensors being built with these to make the system significantly cheaper and lighter and easier to deploy. The satellites used now for Starlink and Kuiper—they work great, but they are bulky and heavy. With this technology for the next generation, you could deploy hundreds of them with a very small and much cheaper launch. It could lead to a much more effective Internet in the sky.

Tell me about ALBA, the experiment on the mission that tested 32 different and novel kinds of photovoltaic solar cells to see how they perform in space. What were the key takeaways?

Hajimiri: My Caltech colleague Harry Atwater led that experiment. What works best on Earth is not necessarily what works best in space. In space there is a lot of radiation damage, and they were able to measure degradation rates over months. On the other hand, there is no water vapor in space, no air oxidation, which is good for materials like perovskites that have problems with those things. So Harry and his team are exploring the trade-offs and developing a lot of new cells that are much cheaper and lighter: Cells made with thin films of perovskites or semiconductors like gallium arsenide, cells that use quantum dots, or use waveguides or other optics to concentrate the light. Many of these cells show very large promise. Very thin layers of gallium arsenide, in particular, seem very conducive to making cells that are lightweight but very high performance and much lower in cost because they need very little semiconductor material.

Many of the design concepts for solar-power satellites, including one your group published in a 2022 preprint, incorporate concentrators to reduce the amount of photovoltaic area and mass needed.

Hajimiri: A challenge with that design is the rather narrow acceptance angle: Things have to be aligned just right so that the focused sunlight hits the cell properly. That’s one of the reasons we’ve pulled away from that approach and moved toward a flat design.

A view from inside MAPLE: On the right is the array of flexible microwave power transmitters, and on the left are receivers they transmit that power to.Caltech

There are some other major differences between the Caltech power satellite design and the other concepts out there. For example, the other designs I’ve seen would use microwaves in the Wi-Fi range, between 2 and 6 gigahertz, because cheap components are available for those frequencies. But yours is at 10 GHz?

Hajimiri: Exactly—and it’s a major advantage because when you double the frequency, the size of the systems in space and on the ground go down by a factor of four. We can do that basically because we build our own microchips and have a lot of capabilities in millimeter-wave circuit design. We’ve actually demonstrated some of these flexible panels that work at 28 GHz.

And your design avoids the need for robots to do major assembly of components in space?

Hajimiri: Our idea is to deploy a fleet of these sail-like structures that then all fly in close formation. They are not attached to each other. That translates to a major cost reduction. Each one of them has little thrusters on the edges, and it contains internal sensors that let it measure its own shape as it flies and then correct the phase of its transmission accordingly. Each would also track its own position relative to the neighbors and its angle to the sun.

From your perspective as an electrical engineer, what are the really hard problems still to be solved?

Hajimiri: Time synchronization between all parts of the transmitter array is incredibly crucial and one of the most interesting challenges for the future.

Because the transmitter is a phased array, each of the million little antennas in the array has to synchronize precisely with the phase of its neighbors in order to steer the beam onto the receiver station on the ground.

Hajimiri: Right. To give you a sense of the level of timing precision that we need across an array like this: We have to reduce phase noise and timing jitter to just a few picoseconds across the entire kilometer-wide transmitter. In the lab, we do that with wires of precise length or optical fibers that feed into CMOS chips with photodiodes built into them. We have some ideas about how to do that wirelessly, but we have no delusions: This is a long journey.

What other challenges loom large?

Hajimiri: The enormous scale of the system and the new manufacturing infrastructure needed to make it is very different from anything humanity has ever built. If I were to rank the challenges, I would put getting the will, resources, and mindshare behind a project of this magnitude as number one.