Semiconductors

[Updated August 8, 2024] The global R&D map is being redrawn, caught between forces of nationalism and the undeniable pull of international collaboration. While the aftershocks of the pandemic and shifting political winds have led some nations to turn inward, the race for innovation is driving a surprising surge in cross-border investment. For instance, South…

NTT Research is playing the long game, tackling challenges that others shy away from. While many R&D labs focus on a relatively near-term ROI for research, NTT is more patient, taking a page from storied labs like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC that prioritize bigger, riskier but potentially more transformative bets. Its website declares: “Our…

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Santa Clara, California, announced last week that its data-center revenue more than doubled year over year, exceeding Wall Street analyst’s estimates. The company also raised its forecast for this year’s sale of AI chips to more than $4.5 billion, an increase of 13% from its forecast three months ago. While this…

Intel’s announcement of 15,000 layoffs is the latest in a wave of workforce reductions impacting the tech sector. Since 2020, major players like Amazon (27,000), Meta (21,000), and Microsoft (14,000) have all significantly reduced their headcounts. Amazon’s cuts have come in several waves, including 18,000 announced in January 2023. Meta’s reductions, part of CEO Mark…

OpenAI, San Francisco, announced last week that it is launching a test version of their long-awaited search engine. SearchGPT will cite news sources such as News Corp. (publisher of the Wall Street Journal) and the Atlantic magazine (published by the Emerson Collective/publisher is Laurene Jobs — Steve Jobs’s widow). OpenAI has also struck partnerships with…

Silicon Valley is still where it’s at in terms of R&D. Yes, the region has cut roughly 45,000 tech jobs since 2022, but its dominance in research and development remains unchallenged, based on data from The 2023 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. And despite the layoffs, many tech companies have reported significant revenue growth. NVIDIA…

Imec, a research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, has announced significant progress in the development of 300 mm silicon-based quantum dot spin qubit processing. The devices demonstrated an average charge noise of 0.6 µeV/√Hz at 1 Hz, the lowest values achieved on a 300 mm fab-compatible platform to date. These results are…

Advent Diamond, a diamond semiconductor technology, has announced the release of the ClearXCam 2304, a novel X-ray beam monitoring technology. Traditionally, diamond has been employed for X-ray beam monitoring with four-quadrant monitors. The new ClearXCam 2304, however, delivers 2304-pixel images of X-ray beams in real-time, thanks to video-rate imaging. According to Advent Diamond, the new…

Established in 1983, ISE Labs has announced that it will expand its semiconductor engineering services with a second Silicon Valley facility in San Jose, California. The expansion doubles its R&D lab and business space. The company notes in an announcement that the new facility strengthens its commitment to the region and the broader U.S. semiconductor…

French electric utility outfit EDF is partnering with quantum computing firms Quandela and the quizzically-named Alice & Bob, alongside the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), to enhance energy consumption in quantum computing. With the support of grant money from the public investment bank Bpifrance, the €6.1M initiative will also compare the energy requirements…

AI is popping up in more and more contexts these days, including in weather forecasting. At Argonne National Laboratory, in a collaboration with UCLA, researchers are tapping a novel AI approach to potentially deliver more accurate forecasts at a fraction of the computational cost of traditional models. For decades, weather forecasting has relied on complex…

Moore’s Law, which predicted the doubling of transistor density roughly every two years, is approaching fundamental physical limits. Yet, GPU technology continues to evolve rapidly, with innovations in architecture and specialized processing units driving consistent performance gains. Multi-chip modules, 3D chip stacking, and advanced cache hierarchies are pushing beyond monolithic die limitations. The first half…

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a technique to measure how extremely thin materials expand when heated. This ability to gauge the thermal expansion coefficient could address a key challenge in microelectronics. The research, published in ACS Nano, focuses on materials that are only a few atoms thick, known as two-dimensional materials. These are…

As the world rapidly adopts 5G technology, with nearly 1.5 billion global subscriptions by the end of 2023, researchers are already rushingi to develop 6G, the next evolution of mobile networks. While China and the U.S. lead in terms of 6G patents, South Korean scientists remain a strong contender in the global race for 6G…

One of the technological hurdles limiting the future of wireless technology is the reliance on bulky, power-hungry radio frequency processors. These processors require an unwieldy blend of piezoelectric- and transistor-based components, which add bulk and sap valuable energy. But a promising study published in Nature Materials offers a potential solution in phononics, a field of study that harnesses…

The R&D World Index (RDWI) for the week ending June 7, 2024, closed at 3,707.32 for the 25 companies in the RDWI. The Index was up 2.44% (or 88.31 basis points). Seventeen RDWI members gained value last week from 0.08% (Alibaba) to 7.45% (Oracle). Eight RDWI members lost value the previous week from -0.10% (Sanofi…

Arizona State University (ASU) and Deca Technologies (Deca), a provider of advanced wafer- and panel-level packaging technology, announced a groundbreaking collaboration to create North America’s first fan-out wafer-level packaging (FOWLP) research and development center. The new Center for Advanced Wafer-Level Packaging Applications and Development is set to catalyze innovation in the United States, expanding domestic…

CEA-Leti has developed a 200 mm gallium nitride/silicon (GaN/Si) process technology compatible with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) cleanrooms that preserves the high performance of the semiconductor material and costs less than existing GaN/SiC technology. In one of nine presentations at IEDM 2023, the institute said that current GaN high-electron-mobility-transistor (HEMT) technologies used in telecom or radar…

The CHIPS Research and Development Office’s Chiplets Interfaces Technical Standards Workshop will be a hybrid in-person and virtual event from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. EST, December 12, 2023, and 8:30 am to 12:30 pm December 13, 2023. The in-person event will take place at the NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) in Rockville,…

ACM Research, a supplier of wafer processing solutions for semiconductor and advanced wafer-level packaging (WLP) applications, announces the grand opening of its new multi-use facility in Hillsboro, Oregon, on November 28. This is a first-of-its-kind property within North America for ACM Research, and its 11,000 ft2 will feature offices, warehouse space, and a dedicated cleanroom/demonstration…

Plasma-Therm, a manufacturer of plasma-process equipment for the semiconductor and compound semiconductor markets, announces it has acquired Thin Film Equipment SrL (TFE), effective September 18, 2023. Based in Binasco (Milano, Italy), TFE is a supplier of sputtering equipment for semiconductor R&D and production and is well-known for its expertise in physical vapor deposition (PVD) sputtering and…

Imec, a research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, has announced that GlobalFoundries, Samsung Electronics, and TSMC have joined imec’s Sustainable Semiconductor Technologies & Systems (SSTS) research program. Launched in 2021, the SSTS program rallies stakeholders from across the semiconductor industry – including systems companies, (equipment) suppliers, and now also three of the…

Imec, a global research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, and Rapidus, Japan’s newly founded chip manufacturer, announced that they have taken an important next step in setting up a long-term and sustainable collaboration in the domain of advanced semiconductor research, with Rapidus joining imec’s Core Partner Program. During a Belgian economic delegation…

Electroninks, a maker of particle-free conductive metal inks and advanced materials, announces a redevelopment of their signature particle-free silver ink for aerosol jet printing applications enabled by Citrine Informatics’ AI-guided R&D platform. “Citrine’s groundbreaking AI-assisted software platform will help enhance not only our silver ink, but eventually all of our particle-free inks for new and…

By Gordon Feller With top-notch universities, federal research institutes, leading companies from nine major industry sectors, and 14 top-ranked hospital systems, Ohio is a “quiet giant” of innovation in industrial sectors and life science. Ohio has the fifth-highest number of Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies — and is home to more than 120 NYSE/Nasdaq…