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Speaking to the Financial Times, Jensen Huang said US export controls introduced by the Biden administration to slow Chinese semiconductor manufacturing had left the Silicon Valley group with "our hands tied behind our back" and unable to sell advanced chips in one of the company's biggest markets.
The Financial Times
US regulators said Silicon Valley Bank depositors would be fully repaid as they acted to shore up the banking system after the lender's implosion, unveiling emergency funding measures and closing down a second financial institution.
The Financial Times
Tesla's leadership said Wednesday at an investor event held at the company's factory near the Texan capital that while silicon carbide transistors are key components, "we've figured out a way to use 75% less without compromising the performance or the efficiency of the car."
MarketWatch
It's hard to feel sorry for Silicon Valley tech workers. From high salaries and generous stock options to nap pods and unlimited time off, they're among the most privileged class of employees in the world. Conversely, there's no denying that these pampered staffers engineered a technology revolution that's brought untold economic and social value to the entire planet.
Bloomberg
The growth is expected to temper in 2023 due to challenging macroeconomic conditions but is forecast to rebound in the years that follow on strong demand for semiconductors used in data center, automotive and industrial applications.
SEMI
Silicon Labs' exit from any business not related to wireless connectivity and IoT devices marks the beginning of the company's journey to becoming a "pure-play" IoT chip designer, according to Silicon Labs CEO Matt Johnson.
EE Times
Wolfspeed, the wide-bandgap chipmaker focused on silicon carbide and gallium nitride devices, plans to spend up to $5 billion to chase demand in the electric vehicle business that shows no signs of slowing down.
EE Times
Infineon Technologies and II-VI have signed a multi-year supply agreement for silicon carbide (SiC) wafers.
Company release
TSMC CEO CC Wei said he had never had an auto industry executive call him until the shortage was desperate. "In the past two years they call me and behave like my best friend," he told a laughing crowd of TSMC partners and customers in Silicon Valley recently. One automaker called to urgently request 25 wafers, said Wei, who is used to fielding orders for 25,000 wafers. "No wonder you cannot get the support."
Reuters
It is unclear if the talks addressed a particular issue, or just represented the heads of the world's top two chipmakers getting together for a chat while Gelsinger was in town.
The Register
Silicon Motion Technology is exploring a potential sale amid takeover interest in the semiconductor firm, according to people familiar with the matter.
Bloomberg
AspenCore's PowerUP Expo 2021 devoted a full day to wide-bandgap semiconductors, specifically gallium nitride and silicon carbide. The WBG panel discussion focused on "the next wave of GaN and SiC," taking its cue from the day's topic presentations, including new product developments, technology challenges, and wafer manufacturing.
EE Times
We've seen a lot of heat dissipation efforts in here: oodles of graphite tape, some serious thermal paste, and now this beefier vapor chamber? At a guess we'd say that catching up to Apple silicon is starting to make Samsung sweat, pun intended.
iFixit
Sumco, a key supplier of silicon wafers for the semiconductor industry, said it has already sold out its production capacity through 2026, a sign shortages in the industry may not abate for years.
The Japan Times
Taiwan's GlobalWafers is close to clearing an important regulatory hurdle in its $5.3 billion acquisition of German silicon wafer manufacturer Siltronic, according to people familiar with the matter.
Bloomberg
Raytheon Technologies and Globalfoundries will collaborate to develop and commercialize a new gallium nitride on silicon (GaN-on-Si) semiconductor that will enable game-changing radio frequency performance for 5G and 6G mobile and wireless infrastructure applications.
Company release
AMD said late Thursday it plans to buy about $1.6 billion in silicon wafers from Globalfoundries over the next few years.
MarketWatch
Infineon Technologies has concluded a supply contract with Japan-based Showa Denko for an extensive range of silicon carbide material (SiC) including epitaxy. The German semiconductor manufacturer has thus secured more base material for the growing demand for SiC-based products.
Company release
Apple is increasing its US investments by 20% over the next five years, allocating US$430 billion to develop next-generation silicon and spur 5G wireless innovation across nine US states, after outstripping its growth expectations during the pandemic.
Bloomberg
Samsung Electronics is pouring US$116 billion into its next-generation chip business that includes fabricating silicon for external clients, betting it can finally close the gap on industry leader TSMC as soon as two years from now.
Bloomberg
The laptops will be first and the desktops are coming later, report claims.
Ars Technica
Desktop Macs with Apple Silicon will come at a later date.
engadget
The trio of techniques aim to give Intel's processors an edge at a time when advances in conventional silicon scaling are slowing and getting more expensive. They arrive as rival TSMC expands its portfolio of chip stacks, and two consortia hope to set standards in the area.
EE Times
A Silicon Valley chip startup backed by Microsoft and Dell Technologies has accused a top executive at Huawei Technologies, Deputy Chairman Eric Xu, of participating in a conspiracy to steal its trade secrets, court documents show.
Wall Street Journal
"The suggestion that we were somehow victim of a national conspiracy is wrong. The facts of the matter are that we were robbed by a handful of our own employees based in Silicon Valley, who had broken the law to enrich themselves. All of this occurred several years ago. We found this out by ourselves and immediately sought legal action in public court in 2016. This was reported on in several publications after our victory in November 2018," said ASML president and CEO Peter Wennink.
Company release
Amazon does not plan to sell this chip directly to customers, but the decision by one of the world's biggest buyers of computer processors to go the do-it-yourself route is likely to have a major impact on Intel, the iconic Silicon Valley chip maker.
New York Times
The company signed the preliminary agreement with South Chungcheong Province to invest some KRW480 billion (US$449 million) for the expansion of its plant in Cheonan, some 80 kilometers south of Seoul, for 300mm silicon wafer, the provincial government said.
Yonhap News
After Imagination Technologies bought MIPS Technologies in 2013, they invested in the architecture and attempted to build a business around it as a potential ARM competitor. These plans largely failed, and Imagination Technologies arranged the sale of MIPS - and itself - to different venture capital firms in the fall of 2017. Now, the company has been brought back to Silicon Valley, where it hopes to build a new line of competitive processors for AI workloads.
ExtremeTech
The industry this year may see a microprocessor ship from startup Graphcore that uses no DRAM and one from rival Cerebras Systems that pioneers wafer-level integration. The hefty 2.5-D Nervana chip acquired by Intel is already sampling, and a dozen other processors are in the works. Meanwhile, chip companies from ARM to Western Digital are working on cores to accelerate the inference part of deep neural nets.
EE Times
Bhatia has over 22 years of engineering and operations experience, including the last 17 years in the semiconductor industry. He most recently served as the executive vice president of Silicon Operations at Western Digital.
Company release
Engineers in Silicon Valley are flocking to Munich this week, but not necessarily to attend Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference which opened Tuesday. Globalfoundries is hosting a "rival" - or perhaps a follow-up - powwow, called the Globalfoundries Technology Conference (GTC), later this week in the capital of German automotive industry.
EE Times
Intel is shedding nearly 140 staff from its Internet of Things business lines. The layoffs were probably inevitable, since during June, Intel discontinued three of its IoT product lines - the Joule, Edison and Galileo compute modules and boards.
The Register
The US is poised to weigh in on whether the sale of chipmaker Lattice Semiconductor could pose a risk to national security. The possible rub: While the buyer is a private-equity firm with a Silicon Valley address, the money behind the deal comes from Beijing.
Bloomberg
Researchers at the Department of Energy's (DoE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have claimed a world record, saying they have patterned devices with feature sizes as small as 1nm. The research team hopes to use the same technique to create and impart to silicon new properties never before observed.
EE Times
Qualcomm no longer refers to Snapdragons as processors, but rather as a platform. It says it is changing the terminology because "Snapdragon is more than a single component, a piece of silicon, or what many would misinterpret as the CPU."
Beta News
German-based chipmaker X-Fab Silicon Foundries SE expects to raise about EUR500 million ($530 million) via an initial public offering in order to fund its global production expansion.
Bloomberg
Most of the hand-wringing over the fate of Moore's Law focuses on the ever-shrinking silicon transistor. But increasingly researchers are concerned with another critical part of the infrastructure: the copper wires that connect individual transistors to form complex circuits.
IEEE Spectrum
Intel's Atom C2000 processor family has a fault that effectively bricks devices, costing the company a significant amount of money to correct. But the semiconductor giant won't disclose precisely how many chips are affected nor which products are at risk.
The Register
The impact of President Trump's immigration ban on tech companies has been immediate.
BBC News
South Korea's LG said in a filing on Monday it agreed to sell a stake in silicon wafer producer LG Siltron to SK Holdings for KRW620 billion (US$531.9 million).
Reuters
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