Microsoft, OpenAI, and NVIDIA warned about power swings and physical damage to power grids increasing from AI training workloads and jointly proposed a multi-pronged approach to stabilize power in AI training data centers.
Meanwhile, Anthropic issued a warning about the weaponization of agentic AI in a new 25-page Threat Intelligence report. Key concerns involve the evolution in AI-assisted cybercrime, sharing insights about “vibe hacking,” with AI serving as a technical consultant and active operator.
U.S. vs. China
- China is ramping up its domestic AI chip production, targeting a threefold increase in output next year with new fabs launching beyond SMIC’s capacity, supported by ecosystem initiatives around DeepSeek’s FP8 format standards.
- Chinese AI company Baidu unveiled its Baige 5.0 AI infrastructure platform, which included its own Kunlunxin Super Node chips. The platform raised the efficiency of DeepSeek’s open-source AI R1 model by about 50%, reports SCMP. Alibaba, meanwhile, announced a new inference chip that will be manufactured in China.
- TSMC will not use Chinese semiconductor equipment in its 2nm production lines, to avoid retaliation by the U.S. government, reports Nikkei Asia.
- The U.S. Commerce Department said it closed a loophole that allowed a handful of foreign companies to export chip manufacturing equipment and technology to China without a license.
In a SEC filing, Intel warned of potential risks due to the U.S. government’s equity stake, including impact to its non-US sales and litigation. In addition, the filing disclosed the government could take more equity if Intel’s stake in its foundry drops below 51% within 5 years.
U.S Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced that NIST will assume operational responsibility for the NSTC from Natcast.
Global semiconductor revenues are expected to nearly double from 2024 to 2030 to more than $1 trillion, driven by AI infrastructure build-out, agentic AI, and the emergence of physical AI, reports Counterpoint. Memory is projected to be the fastest-growing segment, while automotive semiconductors will be the largest end market by 2030, with AI-driven demand reshaping industry dynamics.
SK hynix began mass production of 321-layer QLC NAND flash, delivering a doubling of data transfer speed, 56% write performance improvement, and a 23% write power efficiency improvement.
IBM and AMD plan to jointly integrate high-performance compute systems containing CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs, with quantum computers to accelerate emerging algorithms for fields such as drug discovery, materials discovery, optimization, and logistics.
Taiwanese prosecutors indicted three individuals, including a former TSMC engineer now at Tokyo Electron, for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to TSMC’s cutting-edge 2nm process to assist Tokyo Electron in competing for supplier agreements, reports Reuters. Tokyo Electron has stated it found no evidence of organizational involvement.
Following a tumultuous month, Lip-Bu Tan — now CEO of Intel, and formerly CEO of Cadence — will receive the 2025 Phil Kaufman Award for leadership and business impact on the EDA and semiconductor industries.
AAA evaluated five passenger vehicles with low-speed-capable Active Driving Assistance (ADA) systems, also known as Traffic Jam Assistance, comparing hands-on and hands-off ADA performance in heavy traffic. It found notable events occurred every 9 minutes on average, with the most common being cut-ins and poor lane centering.
Financial updates this week: Marvell Technology, NVIDIA, and Wolfspeed.
Quick links to more news:
Global
In-Depth
Markets and Money
Education and Training
Product News
Research
Automotive and Batteries
Security
Quantum
Events and Further Reading
Global
Americas:
- Amkor Technology revised its plans for the location of the company’s new Arizona advanced semiconductor packaging and test facility. The facility will be constructed on a 104-acre site in north Peoria, Arizona.
- TSMC began construction of a 15-acre industrial water reclamation plant at its Phoenix manufacturing complex, aiming to recycle up to 90% of water used by 2028 to address Arizona’s mega-drought, reports Axios Phoenix.
- Critical Metals signed a 10-year agreement to supply heavy rare earth concentrate to Ucore Rare Metals‘ government-funded processing facility in Louisiana.
Asia:
- In Taiwan, TSMC plans to break ground on its first of four 1.4nm fabs in October, with mass production expected in the second half of 2028 and an output target of 50,000 wafers per month, reports Taipei Times.
- Infineon signed an MoU a Vietnam startup hub to drive innovation in mobility, energy and IoT.
- India PM Modi announced plans to make Gujarat a hub for semiconductor manufacturing.
- Vietnam is planning preferential power tariffs for semiconductor fabs as part of its Semiconductor Industry Development Strategy.
- Intel is collaborating with LG Innotek and its factory in Gumi, Korea, to implement an AI-powered smart factory.
- The Supreme Court of Korea recently upheld a lower court ruling convicting Taiwan-based Everlight Electronics for stealing LED technology.
Europe:
- The University of Copenhagen now has a new wafer factory, the POEM Technology Center, capable of producing 300mm wafers.
- Thema Foundries plans to establish a €200 million (~$233M) photonic chip production, packaging, and testing facility in Oudenaarde, Belgium, at the site of the former BelGaN factory.
In-Depth
Semiconductor Engineering published its Systems and Design newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:
More reporting:
Markets and Money
Acquisitions/Deals:
- Rapidus and Keysight inked a deal to jointly develop a high-precision PDK for 2nm GAA.
- GlobalFoundries and Silicon Labs partnered to scale wireless SoCs on 40LP, enabling next-gen high performance.
- Cadence completed its acquisition of the Arm Artisan foundation IP business.
Funding:
- GlobalFoundries confirmed that its CHIPS Act funding remains secure under a milestone-based framework and does not involve transferring equity to the U.S. government, reports Reuters.
- Paragraf raised $55 million to scale manufacturing of its graphene-based electronic devices, including magnetic and molecular sensors.
- OpenLight, formerly a Synopsys subsidiary, raised $34 million to design photonic ASICs that integrate indium phosphide and silicon photonics for AI data centers.
Reports:
- The semiconductor lithography materials market will reach $6.35B by 2029, growing at a 5.7% CAGR, driven by rising wafer starts, EUV adoption, and advanced device integration, reports TechCet. EUV resists will lead to growth at +38% in 2025 as logic and memory makers add more EUV layers.
- NAND Flash revenues surged 22% quarter-over-quarter in 2Q 2025 to US $14.67 billion, led by robust bit shipments amid production cuts and government stimulus, with Samsung holding a 32.9% market share and SK Group climbing to a record 21.1%, reports TrendForce.
- Other reports: Liquid cooling (TrendForce), PCB shipments (Global Electronics Assoc.), AI processors for cloud and the data center (Omdia).
Product News
Design/Power:
- Keysight launched its Smart Bench Essentials Plus portfolio, which integrates its power supply, waveform generator, digital multimeter, and oscilloscope, and also released an enhanced version of its physical layer compliance test solution for HDMI.
- Infineon is developing humanoid robotics with NVIDIA technology. The company also rolled out 75 mΩ industrial CoolSiC MOSFETs 650 V G2 for medium-power applications with high power density. Additionally, MCUs in the new PSOC Control C3 Performance Line family are now compliant with PQC requirements.
- Rambus’ Multi-Channel Engine MACsec-IP-364 (+363) delivers full line-rate MACsec and optional IPsec support for 1.6T and 3.2T Ethernet ports, offering a highly scalable and configurable solution for securing high-speed data traffic.
- Synopsys is deploying Nvidia’s RTX PRO Servers to accelerate electromagnetic, RF, fluid, and other physics simulation workloads.
- Nvidia debuted a scale-across Ethernet technology to enable distributed data centers to operate as a single AI supercomputer.
- Arteris joined the Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium.
- Marvell announced 64 Gbps bi-directional die-to-die interface IP with bandwidth density over 30 Tbps/mm in 2nm and 3nm nodes for data centers and AI infrastructure.
- Malaysia-based SkyeChip debuted an edge AI processor built on a 7nm node for IoT applications.
- Xscape Photonics and Tower Semiconductor developed an on-chip, optically pumped, multi-wavelength laser source for GPU-to-GPU and GPU-to-HBM optical links in AI data centers.
- Socionext introduced 3D-IC and 5.5D advanced packaging support and recently taped out a design leveraging TSMC‘s SoIC-X 3D stacking.
Manufacturing/Test:
- GF announced the availability of its 22FDX+ RRAM technology for wireless and AI applications, in addition to the production release of its 30CBIC SiGe Platform for high-performance smart mobile, communication and industrial applications.
- Brewer Science will present innovations in sustainable lithography and AI/high-performance computing packaging at SEMICON Taiwan 2025 in Taipei, including a no‑bake lithography process and coordinated ecosystem-based AI packaging.
- SK Hynix developed a High-K Epoxy Molding Compound material to improve thermal conductivity and resistance for mobile DRAM.
- Nova launched a next‑gen modular optical metrology platform tailored for advanced 2.5D/3D semiconductor packaging, including hybrid bonding.
- Rigaku launched a trace metal contamination system for leading‑edge semiconductor processes.
Research
Harvard engineers created a lithium niobate device that can bridge digital electronic signals and analog light signals in one step.
Researchers from TU Dresden and Fraunhofer IIS/EAS et al developed an FPGA-based implementation of network synchronization that takes advantage of TCEP and achieves sub-nanosecond accuracy.
KAUST researchers created a mathematical approach to safeguard aircrafts from 5G interference.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers are using the El Capitan supercomputer to test how materials behave under extreme conditions, including tin.
Researchers at the U. of Toronto, Max Planck, and others demonstrated a multi-agent framework that can successfully translate natural-language photonic integrated circuit design requests into layouts, achieving up to 91% accuracy on single-device designs and around 57% success on multi-component circuits.
Find much more semiconductor research in SE’s technical paper library, with this week’s new additions here.
Automotive and Batteries
CLEPA and ACEA leaders call on the EU to invest in and deliver the technologies needed for a green transition.
NVIDIA said its upcoming DRIVE AGX Thor developer kit will accelerate the design, testing, and deployment of AVs and intelligent mobility solutions. It’s equipped with I/O to support surround cameras, radars, and lidars, and common vehicle interfaces like GbE/10GbE and PCI-Express.
Argonne National Laboratory researchers are using ML models to analyze known electrolyte additives and predict combinations that could improve battery performance.
Fig. 1: Data-driven approach to additive design for electrolytes in LNMO batteries. Credit: Chen Liao/Argonne National Laboratory
Batteries:
- A McKinsey report suggests the global battery market is likely to experience oversupply through 2030, but notes there will still be pockets of demand.
- UC San Diego researchers conducted simulations to identify and better understand transition metal oxides as a replacement to lithium, which the battery market currently depends on.
Security
Seven security experts discussed hardware security challenges, including fundamental GenAI security, small language models, longer device lifetimes, and thermal manipulation. The final article in a three-part series includes Keysight, Rambus, Siemens EDA, Synaptics, Caspia Technologies and Synopsys. [Part one is here. Part two is here.]
L-R: Caspia’s Tehranipoor; Rambus’ Best; Synopsys’ Borza; Synaptics’ Arora, Keysight’s Fern; Microsoft’s Leef; Siemens EDA’s Harrison.
A number of government organizations issued a joint cybersecurity advisory, warning that state-sponsored Chinese cyber attacks have compromised military, transportation and telecommunication networks, and edge routers globally.
NIST revised its security and privacy controls catalog to help organizations manage risks related to software updates and patch releases.
Hacking against state governments is on the rise, including transportation interruptions in Maryland, a ransomware attack in Nevada, and an attack in St. Paul, Minnesota. State and local government organizations appealed for reinstatement of federal funding for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center.
Hackers stole user data from Salesforce customers in a widespread campaign, harvesting credentials from a third-party tool.
Recent security research:
- Security-Oriented Printed-Circuit-Board Routing with Deep Reinforcement Learning (National Sun Yat-sen University, National Chung Hsing University)
- LLMs in the SoC: An Empirical Study of Human-AI Collaboration in Security Operations Centres (Data61, CSIRO, eSentire Inc.)
- FALCON: Autonomous Cyber Threat Intelligence Mining with LLMs for IDS Rule Generation (The University of Alabama, Mississippi State University, The University of Texas at El Paso, National Security Agency)
- TroLL: Exploiting Structural Similarities between Logic Locking and Hardware Trojans (Lehigh University, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, University of Florida, University of Maryland)
CISA issued a number of alerts/advisories.
Education and Training
Eight Ph.D. students at Carnegie Mellon University were granted the SoftBank Group–Arm Fellowship to support research at the intersection of AI and human collaboration.
Representatives from Argonne, Idaho, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, and Sandia national laboratories came together for the inaugural National Laboratory AI Roundtable.
Quantum
A UC Riverside-led study demonstrated how to link multiple quantum chips to produce a functioning, fault-tolerant quantum system.
DARPA launched a program to develop quantum sensors for real-world environments, with initial target deployment in a helicopter. Q-CTRL was among those selected for awards.
MIT Sloan and others issued a Quantum Index Report 2025, providing a data-driven assessment of quantum technologies.
RIKEN, Fujitsu, and NVIDIA started development of Japan’s next supercomputer, which will include GPUs as accelerators and is targeted to begin operation in 2030.
Events and Further Reading
Upcoming webinars are here, including:
Three on-demand webinars showcase Amkor’s manufacturing buildout in Peoria, Arizona: chemical handling, water safety, and air quality.
Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:
| EVENTS | Date | Location |
|---|---|---|
| SEMICON India | Sep 2 – 4 | New Delhi |
| Synopsys Processor IP Summit 2025 | Sep 3 | Sunnyvale, CA |
| International Semiconductor Executive Summit: Europe 2025 | Sep 2 – 4 | Dresden, Germany |
| TECHCON 2025: Semiconductor Research Corporation | Sep 7 – 10 | Austin, TX |
| The Next Revolution of AI: Innovation Summit | Sep 8 – 9 | Mountain View and Palo Alto |
| IEEE European Solid-State Electronics Research Conference | Sep 8 – 11 | Munich, Germany |
| SEMICON Taiwan | Sep 8 – 12 | Taipei |
| AI Infra Summit (formerly AI Hardware & Edge AI Summit) | Sep 9- 11 | Santa Clara, CA |
| Design & Verification Conference: DVCON Taiwan | Sep 9 | Hsinchu, Taiwan |
| RISC-V Automotive Conference 2025 | Sep 9 | Munich, Germany |
| European Microelectronics & Packaging Conference (EMPC 2025) | Sep 16 – 18 | Grenoble, France |
| SPIE Photomask Technology + EUVL | Sep 22 – 25 | Monterey, CA |
| GSA U.S. Executive Forum | Sep 23 | Menlo Park, CA |
| Microelectronics UK | Sep 24 – 25 | London |
| TSMC 2025 North America OIP Ecosystem Forum | Sep 24 | Santa Clara, CA |
| CASPA 2025 Annual Conference | Sep 27 | Santa Clara, CA |
| IMAPS Symposium 2025: International Symposium on Microelectronics | Sep 29 – Oct 2 | San Diego, CA |
| Find all events here. | ||
Semiconductor Engineering’s latest newsletters:
Automotive, Security and Enabling Technologies
Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials
