A police officer in St. Paul, Minnesota apparently thought clocking out for the day meant the rules no longer applied. And thus, the confused gentleman earned himself a DWI today for crashing his personal car into a building last week and starting a fire while intoxicated. — Read the rest

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A new technical paper titled “Experimental demonstration of magnetic tunnel junction-based computational random-access memory” was published by researchers at University of Minnesota and University of Arizona, Tucson.

Abstract

“The conventional computing paradigm struggles to fulfill the rapidly growing demands from emerging applications, especially those for machine intelligence because much of the power and energy is consumed by constant data transfers between logic and memory modules. A new paradigm, called “computational random-access memory (CRAM),” has emerged to address this fundamental limitation. CRAM performs logic operations directly using the memory cells themselves, without having the data ever leave the memory. The energy and performance benefits of CRAM for both conventional and emerging applications have been well established by prior numerical studies. However, there is a lack of experimental demonstration and study of CRAM to evaluate its computational accuracy, which is a realistic and application-critical metric for its technological feasibility and competitiveness. In this work, a CRAM array based on magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) is experimentally demonstrated. First, basic memory operations, as well as 2-, 3-, and 5-input logic operations, are studied. Then, a 1-bit full adder with two different designs is demonstrated. Based on the experimental results, a suite of models has been developed to characterize the accuracy of CRAM computation. Scalar addition, multiplication, and matrix multiplication, which are essential building blocks for many conventional and machine intelligence applications, are evaluated and show promising accuracy performance. With the confirmation of MTJ-based CRAM’s accuracy, there is a strong case that this technology will have a significant impact on power- and energy-demanding applications of machine intelligence.”

Find the technical paper here. Published July 2024.  Find the University of Minnesota’s news release here.

Lv, Y., Zink, B.R., Bloom, R.P. et al. Experimental demonstration of magnetic tunnel junction-based computational random-access memory. npj Unconv. Comput. 1, 3 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44335-024-00003-3.

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Rapidus and IBM are jointly developing mass production capabilities for chiplet-based advanced packages. The collaboration builds on an existing agreement to develop 2nm process technology.

Vanguard and NXP will jointly establish VisionPower Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (VSMC) in Singapore to build a $7.8 billion, 12-inch wafer plant. This is part of a global supply chain shift “Out of China, Out of Taiwan,” according to TrendForce.

Alphawave joined forces with Arm to develop an advanced chiplet based on Arm’s Neoverse Compute Subystems for AI/ML. The chiplet contains the Neoverse N3 CPU core cluster and Arm Coherent Mesh Network, and will be targeted at HPC in data centers, AI/ML applications, and 5G/6G infrastructure.

ElevATE Semiconductor and GlobalFoundries will partner for high-voltage chips to be produced at GF’s facility in Essex Junction, Vermont, which GF bought from IBM. The chips are essential for semiconductor testing equipment, aerospace, and defense systems.

NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Microsoft are under investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department for violation of antitrust laws in the generative AI industry, according to the New York Times.

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Global

Apollo Global Management will invest $11 billion in Intel’s Fab 34 in Ireland, thereby acquiring a 49% stake in Intel’s Irish manufacturing operations.

imec and ASML opened their jointly run High-NA EUV Lithography Lab in Veldhoven, the Netherlands. The lab will be used to prepare  the next-generation litho for high-volume manufacturing, expected to begin in 2025 or 2026.

Expedera opened a new semiconductor IP design center in India. The location, the sixth of its kind for the company, is aimed at helping to make up for a shortfall in trained technicians, researchers, and engineers in the semiconductor sector.

Foxconn will build an advanced computing center in Taiwan with NVIDIA’s Blackwell platform at its core. The site will feature GB200 servers, which consist of 64 racks and 4,608 GPUs, and will be completed by 2026.

Intel and its 14 partner companies in Japan will use Sharp‘s LCD plants to research semiconductor production technology, a cost reduction move that should also produce income for Sharp, according to Nikkei Asia.

Japan is considering legislation to support the commercial production of advanced semiconductors, per Reuters.

Saudi Arabia aims to establish at least 50 semiconductor design companies as part of a new National Semiconductor Hub, funded with over $266 million.

Air Liquide is opening a new industrial gas production facility in Idaho, which will produce ultra-pure nitrogen and other gases for Micron’s new fab.

Microsoft will invest 33.7 billion Swedish crowns ($3.2 billion) to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure in Sweden over a two-year period, reports Bloomberg. The company also will invest $1 billion to establish a new data center in northwest Indiana.

AI data centers could consume as much as 9.1% of the electricity generated in the U.S. by 2030, according to a white paper published by the Electric Power Research Institute. That would more than double the electricity currently consumed by data centers, though EPRI notes this is a worst case scenario and advances in efficiency could be a mitigating factor.

Markets and Money

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced global semiconductor sales increased 15.8% year-over-year in April, and the group projected a market growth of 16% in 2024. Conversely, global semiconductor equipment billings contracted 2% year-over-year to US$26.4 billion in Q1 2024, while quarter-over-quarter billings dropped 6% during the same period, according to SEMI‘s Worldwide Semiconductor Equipment Market Statistics (WWSEMS) Report.

Cadence completed its acquisition of BETA CAE Systems International, a provider of multi-domain, engineering simulation solutions.

Cisco‘s investment arm launched a $1 billion fund to aid AI startups as part of its AI innovation strategy. Nearly $200 million has already been earmarked.

The power and RF GaN markets will grow beyond US$2.45 billion and US$1.9 billion in 2029, respectively, according to Yole, which is offering a webinar on the topic.

The micro LED chip market is predicted to reach $580 million by 2028, driven by head-mounted devices and automotive applications, according to TrendForce. The cost of Micro LED chips may eventually come down due to size miniaturization.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Automotive, Security, and Pervasive Computing newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:

• The Uncertainty Of Certifying AI For Automotive
• Why It’s So Hard To Secure AI Chips
• Toward A Software-Defined Hardware World

More reporting this week:

• Chip Design Digs Deeper Into AI
• Why IC Design Safety Nets Have Limits
• Opportunities Grow For GPU Acceleration

Security

Scott Best, Rambus senior director of Silicon Security Products, delivered a keynote at the Hardwear.io conference this week (below), detailing a $60 billion reverse engineering threat for hardware in just three markets — $30 billion for printer consumables, $20 billion for rechargeable batteries with some type of authentication, and $10 billion for medical devices such as sonogram probes.

Photo source: Ed Sperling/Semiconductor Engineering

wolfSSL debuted wolfHSM for automotive hardware security modules, with its cryptographic library ported to run in automotive HSMs like Infineon’s Aurix Tricore TC3XX.

Cisco integrated AMD Pensando data processing units (DPUs) with its Hypershield security architecture for defending AI-scale data centers.

OMNIVISION released an intelligent CMOS image sensor for human presence detection, infrared facial authentication, and always-on technology with a single sensing camera. And two new image sensors for industrial and consumer security surveillance cameras.

Digital Catapult announced a new cohort of companies will join Digital Security by Design’s Technology Access Program, gaining access to an Arm Morello prototype evaluation hardware kit based on Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI), to find applications across critical UK sectors.

University of Southampton researchers used formal verification to evaluate the hardware reliability of a RISC-V ibex core in the presence of soft errors.

Several institutions published their students’ master’s and PhD work:

• Virginia Tech published a dissertation proposing sPACtre, a defense mechanism that aims to prevent Spectre control-flow attacks on existing hardware.
• Wright State University published a thesis proposing an approach that uses various machine learning models to bring an improvement in hardware Trojan identification with power signal side channel analysis
• Wright State University published a thesis examining the effect of aging on the reliability of SRAM PUFs used for secure and trusted microelectronics IC applications.
• Nanyang Technological University published a Final Year Project proposing a novel SAT-based circuit preprocessing attack based on the concept of logic cones to enhance the efficacy of SAT attacks on complex circuits like multipliers.

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

Education and Training

Renesas and the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IIT Hyderabad) signed a three-year MoU to collaborate on VLSI and embedded semiconductor systems, with a focus on R&D and academic interactions to advance the “Make in India” strategy.

Charlie Parker, senior machine learning engineer at Tignis, presented a talk on “Why Every Fab Should Be Using AI.”

Penn State and the National Sun Yat-Sen University (NSYSU) in Taiwan partnered to develop educational and research programs focused on semiconductors and photonics.

Rapidus and Hokkaido University partnered on education and research to enhance Japan’s scientific and technological capabilities and develop human resources for the semiconductor industry.

The University of Minnesota named Steve Koester its first “Chief Semiconductor Officer,” and launched a website devoted to semiconductor and microelectronics research and education.

The state of Michigan invested $10 million toward semiconductor workforce development.

Product News

Siemens reported breakthroughs in high-level C++ verification that will be used in conjunction with its Catapult software. Designers will be able to use formal property checking via the Catapult Formal Assert software and reachability coverage analysis through Catapult Formal CoverCheck.

Infineon released several products:

• 600 V CoolMOS 8 high voltage superjunction (SJ) MOSFET product family.
• CoolGaN bidirectional switch (BDS) and CoolGaN Smart Sense device.
• New CoolSiC MOSFET discretes 650 V, with two product families housed in the Thin-TOLL 8×8 and TOLT packages to increase system power density.

Augmental, an MIT Media Lab spinoff, released a tongue-based computer controller, dubbed the MouthPad.

NVIDIA revealed a new line of products that will form the basis of next-gen AI data centers. Along with partners ASRock Rack, ASUS, GIGABYTE, Ingrasys, and others, the NVIDIA GPUs and networking tech will offer cloud, on-premises, embedded, and edge AI systems. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang showed off the company’s upcoming Rubin platform, which will succeed its current Blackwell platform. The new system will feature new GPUs, an Arm-based CPU and advanced networking with NVLink 6, CX9 SuperNIC and X1600 converged InfiniBand/Ethernet switch.

Intel showed off its Xeon 6 processors at Computex 2024. The company also unveiled architectural details for its Lunar Lake client computing processor, which will use 40% less SoC power, as well as a new NPU, and X2 graphic processing unit cores for gaming.

Research

imec released a roadmap for superconducting digital technology to revolutionize AI/ML.

CEA-Leti reported breakthroughs in three projects it considers key to the next generation of CMOS image sensors. The projects involved embedding AI in the CIS and stacking multiple dies to create 3D architectures.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT-CSAIL) used a type of generative AI, known as diffusion models, to train multi-purpose robots, and designed the Grasping Neural Process for more intelligent robotic grasping.

IBM and Pasqal partnered to develop a common approach to quantum-centric supercomputing and to promote application research in chemistry and materials science.

Stanford University and Q-NEXT researchers investigated diamond to find the source of its temperamental nature when it comes to emitting quantum signals.

TU Wien researchers investigated how AI categorizes images.

In Canada:

• Simon Fraser University received funding of over $80 million from various sources to upgrade the supercomputing facility at the Cedar National Host Site.
• The Digital Research Alliance of Canada announced $10.28 million to renew the University of Victoria’s Arbutus cloud infrastructure.
• The Canadian government invested $18.4 million in quantum research at the University of Waterloo.

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

Semiconductor Engineering’s latest newsletters:

Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing
Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials

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