Short updates from the semiconductor industry, with context and links to the relevant chapters. RSS
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July 17, 2026 Companies & Market
TSMC is increasing its 2026 investment budget to as much as $64 billion and committing an additional $100 billion to expand in the United States, as demand for AI chips remains well ahead of supply at advanced nodes.
July 23, 2026 Design & EDA
As silicon photonics moves into volume production, design tools must verify waveguides, optical conversion, thermal effects, and full electro-optical behavior—not just electrical connectivity.
July 23, 2026 Design & EDA
In multi-chiplet 3D-ICs, the final sign-off stage is no longer only about placing and routing connections. The source article argues that interface planning, protocol compliance, multiphysics analysis, and assembly verification must all be resolved before physical implementation can proceed.
July 27, 2026 Artificial intelligence
A Semiconductor Engineering panel argues that generative AI will change how engineers work, how verification is done, and how design economics may evolve. The discussion also highlights new demands for sandboxing, auditability, benchmark data, and human-readable interfaces.
August 4, 2026 Industry & People
A Semiconductor Engineering opinion piece argues that AI may help with verification and routine tasks, but it cannot replace the experience, judgment and creativity that junior engineers need to develop into future senior engineers.
August 7, 2026 Research
A technical paper from imec introduces a lubrication-elasticity model for bond-front motion in direct bonding. The formulation describes how the unbonded region shrinks, why the front accelerates, and how scaling laws can be used to track the process in wafer and die bonding.
August 7, 2026 Research
Researchers from MIT, SLAC, Stanford University and Argonne National Laboratory have developed a non-contact X-ray method that resolves thermal transport in GaN thin films both in space and time. The approach extracts in-plane thermal conductivity and thermal boundary conductance from GaN-on-silicon structures.
August 7, 2026 Design & EDA
Long-lived embedded products are outgrowing fixed flash partitioning as applications, logs, configuration data, and OTA updates keep changing after deployment. The article argues for treating storage as a managed resource rather than a permanently carved-up layout.
August 10, 2026 Research
Three recent studies point to denser three-dimensional integration, analog content-addressable memory based on MoS2 flash cells, and a phototransistor that combines light sensing, storage, and computation in one device.
August 10, 2026 Research
A new Semiconductor Engineering paper roundup covers ultrafast optical switching in doped semiconductors, foundry-compatible silicon-photonics MEMS switching, GPU-accelerated switching-power analysis, neuromorphic computing, and magneto-ionic hardware security.
August 10, 2026 Devices & Products
A teardown of replacement batteries for Olympus and OM System cameras points to a mix of aging prismatic cells, simple protection circuitry, and inconsistent manufacturing quality behind the swelling problem.
August 11, 2026 Design & EDA
EDN reports on QUINSIM’s Analog Uncertainty-Aware Design platform, which combines sparse polynomial chaos, copula-based dependence modeling and Sobol sensitivity analysis to estimate yield faster than brute-force Monte Carlo in advanced analog and mixed-signal designs.
August 11, 2026 Supply Chain & Sites
Poorly maintained component libraries can turn into a manufacturing risk, from obsolescence to counterfeit exposure in PCB production.
August 18, 2026 Artificial intelligence
For AI accelerators, packaging is no longer a late-stage enclosure choice. As HBM, chiplets, optical I/O, power delivery, cooling, and test constraints converge, the package increasingly determines which system architecture can actually be built.
August 18, 2026 Devices & Products
Beyond AI performance, the economics of humanoid robots will also depend on common interconnect standards. MIPI interfaces are presented as a way to reduce cabling, power consumption, and system cost.