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

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

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

The dream of fusion power inched closer to reality in December 2022, when researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) revealed that a fusion reaction had produced more energy than what was required to kick-start it. According to new research, the momentary fusion feat required exquisite choreography and extensive preparations, whose high degree of difficulty reveals a long road ahead before anyone dares hope a practicable power source could be at hand.

The groundbreaking result was achieved at the California lab’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), which uses an array of 192 high-power lasers to blast tiny pellets of deuterium and tritium fuel in a process known as inertial confinement fusion. This causes the fuel to implode, smashing its atoms together and generating higher temperatures and pressures than are found at the center of the sun. The atoms then fuse together, releasing huge amounts of energy.

“It showed there’s nothing fundamentally limiting us from being able to harness fusion in the laboratory.” —Annie Kritcher, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The facility has been running since 2011, and for a long time the amount of energy produced by these reactions was significantly less than the amount of laser energy pumped into the fuel. But on 5 December 2022, researchers at NIF announced that they had finally achieved breakeven by generating 1.5 times more energy than was required to start the fusion reaction.

A new paper published yesterday in Physical Review Letters confirms the team’s claims and details the complex engineering required to make it possible. While the results underscore the considerable work ahead, Annie Kritcher, a physicist at LLNL who led design of the experiment, says it still signals a major milestone in fusion science. “It showed there’s nothing fundamentally limiting us from being able to harness fusion in the laboratory,” she says.

While the experiment was characterized as a breakthrough, Kritcher says it was actually the result of painstaking incremental improvements to the facility’s equipment and processes. In particular, the team has spent years perfecting the design of the fuel pellet and the cylindrical gold container that houses it, known as a “hohlraum”.

Why is fusion so hard?

When lasers hit the outside of this capsule, their energy is converted into X-rays that then blast the fuel pellet, which consists of a diamond outer shell coated on the inside with deuterium and tritium fuel. It’s crucial that the hohlraum is as symmetrical as possible, says Kritcher, so it distributes X-rays evenly across the pellet. This ensures the fuel is compressed equally from all sides, allowing it to reach the temperatures and pressures required for fusion. “If you don’t do that, you can basically imagine your plasmas squirting out in one direction, and you can’t squeeze it and heat it enough,” she says.

The team has since carried out six more experiments—two that have generated roughly the same amount of energy as was put in and four that significantly exceeded it.

Carefully tailoring the laser beams is also important, Kritcher says, because laser light can scatter off the hohlraum, reducing efficiency and potentially damaging laser optics. In addition, as soon as the laser starts to hit the capsule, it starts giving off a plume of plasma that interferes with the beam. “It’s a race against time,” says Kritcher. “We’re trying to get the laser pulse in there before this happens, because then you can’t get the laser energy to go where you want it to go.”

The design process is slowgoing, because the facility is capable of carrying out only a few shots a year, limiting the team’s ability to iterate. And predicting how those changes will pan out ahead of time is challenging because of our poor understanding of the extreme physics at play. “We’re blasting a tiny target with the biggest laser in the world, and a whole lot of crap is flying all over the place,” says Kritcher. “And we’re trying to control that to very, very precise levels.”

Nonetheless, by analyzing the results of previous experiments and using computer modeling, the team was able to crack the problem. They worked out that using a slightly higher power laser coupled with a thicker diamond shell around the fuel pellet could overcome the destabilizing effects of imperfections on the pellet’s surface. Moreover, they found these modifications could also help confine the fusion reaction for long enough for it to become self-sustaining. The resulting experiment ended up producing 3.15 megajoules, considerably more than the 2.05 MJ produced by the lasers.

Since then, the team has carried out six more experiments—two that have generated roughly the same amount of energy as was put in and four that significantly exceeded it. Consistently achieving breakeven is a significant feat, says Kritcher. However, she adds that the significant variability in the amount of energy produced remains something the researchers need to address.

This kind of inconsistency is unsurprising, though, says Saskia Mordijck, an associate professor of physics at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. The amount of energy generated is strongly linked to how self-sustaining the reactions are, which can be impacted by very small changes in the setup, she says. She compares the challenge to landing on the moon—we know how to do it, but it’s such an enormous technical challenge that there’s no guarantee you’ll stick the landing.

Relatedly, researchers from the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics today reported in the journal Nature Physics that they have developed an inertial confinement fusion system that’s one-hundredth the size of NIF’s. Their 28 kilojoule laser system, the team noted, can at least yield more fusion energy than what is contained in the central plasma—an accomplishment that’s on the road toward NIF’s success, but still a distance away. They’re calling what they’ve developed a “spark plug“ toward more energetic reactions.

Both NIF’s and LLE’s newly reported results represent steps along a development path—where in both cases that path remains long and challenging if inertial confinement fusion is to ever become more than a research curiosity, though.

Plenty of other obstacles remain than those noted above, too. Current calculations compare energy generated against the NIF laser’s output, but that brushes over the fact that the lasers draw more than 100 times the power from the grid than any fusion reaction yields. That means either energy gains or laser efficiency would need to improve by two orders of magnitude to break even in any practical sense. The NIF’s fuel pellets are also extremely expensive, says Kritcher, each one pricing in at an estimated $100,000. Then, producing a reasonable amount of power would mean dramatically increasing the frequency of NIF’s shots—a feat barely on the horizon for a reactor that requires months to load up the next nanosecond-long burst.

“Those are the biggest challenges,” Kritcher says. “But I think if we overcome those, it’s really not that hard at that point.”

UPDATE: 8 Feb. 2024: The story was corrected to attribute the final quote to Annie Kritcher, not Saskia Mordijck, as the story originally stated.
6 Feb. 2024 6 p.m. ET: The story was updated to include news of the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics new research findings.