GrAI Matter Labs, a pioneer of brain-inspired ultra-low latency computing, announced today that it will be unveiling GrAI VIP, a full-stack AI system-on-chip platform, to partners and customers at GLOBAL INDUSTRIE, May 17th-20th, 2022. At GLOBAL INDUSTRIE, GML will demonstrate a live event-based, brain-inspired computing solution for purpose-built, efficient inference in a real-world application of robotics using the Life-Ready GrAI VIP chip. GrAI VIP is an industry-first near-sensor AI solution with 16-bit floating-point capability that achieves best-in-class performance with a low-power envelope. It opens up unparalleled applications that rely on understanding and transformations of signals produced by a multitude of sensors at the edge in Robotics, AR/VR, Smart Homes, Infotainment in automobiles and more.

"GrAI VIP is ready to deliver Life-Ready AI to industrial automation applications and revolutionize systems such as pick & place robots, cobots, and warehouse robots, as being demonstrated at the show," said Ingolf Held, CEO of GrAI Matter Labs. "GrAI Matter Labs has a pipeline of over $1 Million in pre-orders, and we are thrilled to enable our early-access partners and customers in industrial automation, consumer electronics, defence and more, with our GrAI VIP M.2 cards sampling today." "GML is targeting the $1 billion+ fast-growing market (20%+ per year) of endpoint AI with a unique approach backed by innovative technology," said Karl Freund, Founder and Principal Analyst at Cambrian-AI Research. "GML's 'Life-Ready' AI provides solutions that here-to-fore were simply impossible at such low footprint and power." AI application developers looking for high fidelity and low latency responses for their edge algorithms can now get early access to the GrAI VIP platform and drive game-changing products in industrial automation, consumer electronics, and more.

Earlier this week, news about TSMC increasing prices in 2023 made its way online and now Samsung Foundry is said to be discussing price hikes with its customers to make up for the increased costs in materials. TSMC already increased its prices by around 20 percent at the end of 2021 and now it looks like Samsung Foundry is set to follow suit with a similar price hike. Depending on the node, the company is said to be looking at increases of between 15 to 20 percent. The somewhat peculiar thing in the case of Samsung Foundry, is that the company is looking at asking for more money on older, legacy nodes, than it will for its cutting edge nodes.

The price increases are said to come into effect sometime in the second half of 2022, so more than six months after TSMC's price hike. The company is still in negotiation with some of its customers, while others have already come to an agreement with Samsung Foundries. The costs to produce chips are said to be increasing by 20 to 30 percent across the board, no matter if we're talking materials needed to produce integrated circuits, or building new factories, according to Bloomberg. Samsung Foundries have also managed to secure long-term orders for the next five years, with a combined value of around eight times that of previous year's revenue, according to its EVP, Kang Moon-soo. The company is hoping to overtake TSMC in the future and invested more than US$36 billion in 2021 alone to expand its foundry business with new fabs and EUV machines. The good news is that Samsung Foundry claims to be back on track when it comes to yield on its 4 nm node and mass production of its 3 nm node is said to start this quarter.

The global inflation rises are no secret and more and more companies are looking to increase prices of their goods, so not entirely unsurprising, reports of TSMC planning price hikes in early 2023 are starting to appear. TSMC has supposedly already contacted its customers to notify them about the upcoming price increase, to give them as much time as possible to make any changes to their plans, if needed. The price increase will vary depending on the node in question, but is reported to be somewhere between five and eight percent according to the Nikkei.

Part of the increase is also related to TSMC's rapid expansion that's going on at the moment, since the company is going to need to invest a lot more capital when it comes to building the advanced fabs that its customers are relying on. TSMC is expected to invest some US$40-44 billion this year alone on fabs and new equipment. This is a fairly small price increase compared to the big increase TSMC implemented in August 2021, where some nodes saw price hikes of up to 20 percent. That said, TSMC isn't alone in increasing their pricing, as UMC and SMIC have also increased their prices several times since last year. Nikkei claims that UMC and SMIC are charging more than TSMC on some nodes. However, in the past, TSMC used to offer discounts to its clients on a quarterly basis once a chip had gone into mass production and everything progressed smoothly, but TSMC discontinued this discount scheme last year. As such, it looks like cheaper chip costs aren't to be expected any time soon.

Montage Technology, a leading data processing and interconnect IC design company, today announced it is now producing its 5600 MT/s 2nd-generation DDR5 RCD (RCD02) chip to support memory module vendors to enable the DDR5-5600 ecosystem. The new device is targeted for demanding applications such as next-generation servers, edge computing, and AI. The RCD02 is compliant with the latest JEDEC DDR5RCD02 specification. Compared with the 1st-generation RCD (RCD01), the RCD02 boosts DDR5 data rate by 16.67%. The RCD02 chip adopts dual-channel memory architecture, supports 1.1 V VDD and 1.0 V VDDIO voltages and several power saving modes, thus enabling a great reduction in power consumption.

In addition to providing industry-leading performance, power efficiency and reliability at the device level, Montage's DDR5 RCD02 solution supports CA, CS and DFE training modes, dual frequency, as well as other advanced features to facilitate the higher speed for the next generation DDR5 platform.
"An insatiable demand for bandwidth in everything from high-performance computing to AI training, gaming, is fueling the development of the next-generation memory," said Montage Technology's President, Stephen Tai. "Montage is delighted to be the first in the industry to successfully produce the DDR5 RCD02 chip to help meet the ever-increasing demand for memory bandwidth."

International semiconductor consortium or ISMC is a new joint venture between Abu Dhabi-based Next Orbit Ventures and Israeli Tower Semiconductor that is getting ready to invest big. The consortium is said to be looking at investing no less than US$3 billion in a chip foundry based in Karnataka, India. Maybe the most interesting part here is that Tower Semiconductor is set to be acquired by Intel, assuming the deal passes all regulatory reviews. This means that Intel could be replacing Tower Semiconductor in the consortium before the new fab has been finished.

Not much information is available about ISMC, but the planned chip plant would be one of the first foundries in India, as well as the largest foundry in the nation. So far ISMC has only signed a memorandum of Understanding with the government of Karnataka, so things could still change. However, the US$10 billion incentive by the central Indian government might be part of the reason behind the decision. Tower Semiconductor specialises in various speciality process technologies, such as SiGe, BiCMOS and SOI and manufacturer mixed-signal and RFCMOS chips, as well as CMOS based image sensors, power management chips and various types of non-volatile memory and some MEMS products for its customers. The new fab is expected to bring 1,500 direct and some 10,000 indirect jobs to the region.

In an interview with CNBC's TechCheck, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said he expected the chip shortage to continue to drag on, at least until 2024. Unfortunately he didn't go into too much detail as to why, beyond there being an equipment shortage, which in turn will slow down the speed at which new fabs can be put online. In other words, Intel is pointing fingers at ASML and other companies that manufacture the various types of equipment that is needed to manufacture semiconductors.

Intel is the first company to have publicly said that the semiconductor shortage will continue longer than initially expected, where most companies expected things to ease off towards the end of this year, or at least sometime in 2023. The shortage isn't likely to affect Intel when it comes to products the company manufactures in-house, but if the shortage continues into the foreseeable future, it might have a bigger knock-on effect when it comes to the wide ecosystem that Intel is reliant on, such as motherboards. The other concern is obviously Intel's products that are being manufactured by TSMC, where the company is likely to see increased competition when it comes to getting access to enough capacity at certain production nodes.

According to an article over on The Register, the TSMC founder, Morris Chang, isn't overly impressed by US efforts to grow its domestic chip production. In a podcast hosted by the Brookings Institution, Morris Chang said that the US' attempt to grow its domestic chip production will be "a wasteful, expensive exercise in futility." The reason behind his comment is that he believes the US is lacking the talent to work in the fabs, or possibly the willingness to work triple-shift to keep the fabs running 24/7, unlike the Taiwanese. Furthermore, he states that the US can't compete in terms of cost, as he claims it's 50 percent more expensive to manufacture chips in the US compared to Taiwan.

It should be pointed out that Morris Chang is no longer involved with the day to day operations at TSMC and the above are just his opinion. When questioned about why TSMC is building a fab in Arizona, Chang said that TSMC decided to do it because they were urged to do so by the US government. He also believes that despite government subsidies, the US is unlikely to become self-sufficient when it comes to semiconductors, especially as the cost per chip will be much higher, which will make it hard to compete internationally. However, he does mention that if the PRC decided to start a war with Taiwan, then the bet is likely to pay off for the US, but there are obviously other problems that such a situation would bring as well. Chang also praises US chip design talent and says that Taiwan has very little talent in comparison and that TSMC has none. However, the latter doesn't seem to be entirely true, based on the fact that TSMC is helping its customers to optimise their designs for the various production nodes at TSMC. For those interested, the podcast can be found below.

Intel is slowly transitioning its data center customers to a new processor generation called Sapphire Rapids. Today, thanks to the hardware leaker Yuuki_ans we have more profound insights into the top-end 56-core Sapphire Rapids processor and its power settings. According to the leak, we have information on either Xeon Platinum 8476 or Platinum 8480 designs that are equipped with 56 cores and 112 threads. This model was running at the base frequency of 1.9 GHz and a boost frequency of 3.3 GHz. Single-core can boost to 3.7 GHz if the report is giving a correct reading. Remember that this is only an engineering sample, so the final target speeds could differ. It carries 112 MB of L2 and 105 MB of L3 cache, and this sample was running with 1 TB of DDR5 memory with CL40-39-38-76 timings.

Perhaps the most exciting finding is the power configuration of this SKU. Intel has enabled this CPU to consume 350 Watts in PL1 rating, with up to 420 Watts in PL2 performance mode. The enforced BIOS power limit rating is set at an astonishing 764 Watts, which could happen with AVX-512 enabled. Final TDP ratings are yet to be disclosed; however, these Sapphire Rapids processors are shaping to be relatively power-hungry chips.

Based on a report by Susquehanna, the lead time for what can be called ancillary semiconductors, i.e. the kind that are paired up with processor, SoCs and GPUs, now have a lead time of over six months. This is based on data from the distribution channel and as such, it's unlikely to affect large companies that have long-term contracts with their suppliers. However, smaller companies, or semiconductor manufacturers that solely rely on the distribution channel for sales of the parts, are not in a good place right now. Obviously this doesn't affect everything equally and many parts are also in stock with the big distributors, but sometimes at inflated prices compared to a couple of years ago.

Susquehanna is pointing towards several reasons for the increase in lead times, although the big ones include the Russia's war on Ukraine, an earthquake in Japan (on the 16th of March) as well as the more recent lockdowns in several cities in the PRC which are key to the production of everything from semiconductors to finished consumer goods. At the latter half of 2020, the lead time was less than 14 weeks, but has since then increased to almost 27 weeks and it looks like it's likely to continue to increase for the time being. The worst hit components are said to be analogue chips, so things like signal amplifiers, power control oscillators and the like, which had the lead times increased by 18 over the space of a month. The report says that Broadcom has increased its shipping times by as much as 30 weeks and its backlog of orders just keeps growing. This is quite surprising, as earlier reports mentioned that the WiFi makers were reasonably unaffected by the increase in lead times, but Broadcom does make a wealth of other products too, so this could be unrelated. On a more positive note, it seems like the lead time for passive components has improved by a couple of days, with an average lead time of 25 weeks.

A new quarter and another forecast shattering revenue report from TSMC, as the company beat analysts' forecasts by over US$658 million, with a total revenue for the quarter of US$17.6 billion and a net income of almost US$7.26 billion. That's an increase in net income of 45.1 percent or 35.5 percent in sales. Although the monetary figures might be interesting to some, far more interesting details were also shared, such as production updates about future nodes. As a followup on yesterday's news post about 3 nanometer nodes, the N3 node is officially on track for mass production in the second half of this year. TSMC says that customer engagement is stronger than at the start of its N7 and N7 nodes, with HPC and smartphone chip makers lining up to get onboard. The N3E node is, as reported yesterday, expected to enter mass production in the second half of 2023, or a year after N3. Finally, the N2 node is expected in 2025 and won't adhere to TSMC's two year process technology cadence.

Breaking down the revenue by nodes, N7 has taken back the lead over N5, as N7 accounted for 30 percent of TSMC's Q1 revenues up from 27 percent last quarter, but down from 35 percent in the previous year. N5 sits at 20 percent, which is down from 23 percent in the previous quarter, but up from 14 percent a year ago. The 16 and 28 nm nodes still hold on to 25 percent of TSMC's revenue, which is the same as a year ago and up slightly from the previous quarter. Remaining nodes are unchanged from last quarter.

Polyn Technology announced today that its first Neuromorphic Analog Signal Processor (NASP) chip is packaged and evaluated, demonstrating proof of the technology's brain-mimicking architecture. It is the first Tiny AI true analog design to be used next to sensors. Polyn Technology is an innovative provider of ultra-low-power-performance NASP technology and a producer of unique Tiny AI chips and their associated IP. "This achievement validates the intensive work of our multinational team," said Aleksandr Timofeev, CEO and founder of Polyn Technology. "Our chip represents the most advanced technology bridging analog computations and the digital core. It is designed with neuroscience in mind, replicating pre-processing the primary cortical area of the human brain does at the periphery before learning at the center."

The NASP chip enables full data processing disaggregation between the sensor node and the cloud; it truly embodies the Tiny AI concept. The NASP test chip contains several neural networks. The chip is implemented in 55 nm CMOS technology. Its design proves the NASP "neuron" model as well as the scalability of the technology and efficiency of the chip design automation tools developed by Polyn. "Our first chip is created from trained neural networks by NASP Compiler and synthesis tools that generated Netlist and the silicon engineering files from the software math model simulation. We will continue to refine our technology for creation of new generation chips," said Yaakov Milstain, COO of Polyn. Polyn anticipates the chip will be available to customers in the first quarter of 2023 as its first wearables product, with a fusion of PPG and IMU sensors for the most accurate heart rate measurement along with recognition and tracking of human activity.

MediaTek has announced it is the first TV SoC vendor to support Dolby Vision IQ with Precision Detail. Precision Detail is a new innovative feature introduced for TVs with Dolby Vision IQ, which will be supported in MediaTek's Pentonic series for 8K and 4K smart TVs. In addition, the Pentonic series will enable TV manufacturers to support features designed for gaming in Dolby Vision along with other advanced capabilities. MediaTek and Dolby collaborated on the implementation of these technologies, which will be available starting in 2H 2022 for TV OEMs to begin adopting.

Joining Dolby's suite of Advanced Imaging technologies available through Dolby Vision IQ, Precision Detail unlocks more from Dolby Vision content by revealing incredible detail in both bright and dark areas. With added texture and depth, images take on a new dimension with astonishing crispness on 8K and 4K smart TVs. In addition to Precision Detail, MediaTek's Intelligent View technology paired with Dolby's latest advancements in imaging technology can process multiple Dolby Vision streams simultaneously. Consumers can now watch different media sources at the same time in Dolby Vision in multiple windows, all in stunning detail.

You'd be forgiven if you're not familiar with Airoha, as although the company has been around since 2001, it's been a company that has mostly been flying under the radar. Back in 2007, Mediatek became a majority shareholder by buying out Benq's stake in Airoha and a decade later, MediaTek merged some of its business units into Airoha, which is the opposite way to how it normally goes. MediaTek is getting ready to list Airoha on the Taiwanese stock market and this comes with several benefits to the company. Airoha's main product line is Bluetooth chips, but it also makes various solutions for GPS/GNSS, WiFi, DVB-S and xPON internet gateways and routers. Sony is one of its major customers, after the company switched from Qualcomm to MediaTek/Airoha a few years ago. Other customers are said to be Beats by Apple, JBL by Harman (which in turn is owned by Samsung), Skullcandy and Xiaomio.

The company is said to first be listed on Taiwan's Emerging Stock Market for at least six months—a requirement by Taiwanese law—before the company will be making a full IPO. The company is said to be valued at US$3.3 billion, so despite being a mostly unheard of company, we're not talking about some little startup here. MediaTek is expecting Airoha to see a revenue growth of around 30 percent in 2022, from 2021 revenues of around US$562 million. As these things go, it would appear that the main reason for listing Airoha isn't directly to make money, but rather to try and appeal to current and future employees. This is because of the peculiar bonus structure in most companies in Taiwan, where all employees are given a share of the profits, largely regardless of their personal and departments performance. With Airoha going public, its employees will no longer have to share their bonuses with MediaTek employees, which could in theory lead to better bonuses for their employees.

The output value of the world's top 10 foundries in 4Q21 reached US$29.55 billion, or 8.3% growth QoQ, according to TrendForce's research. This is due to the interaction of two major factors. One is limited growth in overall production capacity. At present, the shortage of certain components for TVs and laptops has eased but there are other peripheral materials derived from mature process such as PMIC, Wi-Fi, and MCU that are still in short supply, precipitating continued fully loaded foundry capacity. Second is rising average selling price (ASP). In the fourth quarter, more expensive wafers were produced in succession led by TSMC and foundries continued to adjust their product mix to increase ASP. In terms of changes in this quarter's top 10 ranking, Nexchip overtook incumbent DB Hitek to clinch 10th place.

TrendForce believes that the output value of the world's top ten foundries will maintain a growth trend in 1Q22 but appreciation in ASP will still be the primary driver of said growth. However, since there are fewer first quarter working days in the Greater China Area due to the Lunar New Year holiday and this is the time when some foundries schedule an annual maintenance period, 1Q22 growth rate will be down slightly compared to 4Q21.

Ansys announced it is collaborating with GF to deliver innovative, unique, and feature-rich solutions to solve some of the biggest challenges facing data centers today. With data being generated at a record pace, causing a surge of power consumption in data centers globally, there is an ever-increasing need for innovative solutions to accelerate data transmission while optimizing energy efficiency. To meet such rising demands, GF is focused on developing groundbreaking semiconductor solutions that leverage the potential of photons—instead of electrons—to transfer and move data, maintaining GF's position as a leader in the rapidly growing optical networking space.

GF Fotonix is GF's next generation, widely disruptive, monolithic platform. GF Fotonix is the first in the industry to combine its differentiated 300 mm photonics and RF-CMOS features on a silicon wafer, delivering best-in-class performance at scale. "Our engagement with Ansys is another example of how GF is partnering with the ecosystem leaders to deliver innovative, time to market solutions for our customers," said Mike Cadigan, senior vice president for Customer Design Enablement, GF. "By coupling GF Fotonix with Ansys' industry-leading simulation solutions, we are reaching new levels in photonic chip design. With support for Verilog-A simulation and process-enabled custom design, designers have greater modeling capabilities to meet their performance, power, and density requirements."

In an interview with IEEE Spectrum Dr. Y.J. Mii, Senior Vice President of Research and Development at TSMC, said that he believes that we're not going to see an end to the chip shortage until the next generation of fabs that are currently under construction, or will commence soon, come online in two to three years. Interestingly, Mii is apparently not putting the blame squarely at the pandemic as so many others have for the components shortage, but rather points towards the fact that chips are being used in just about every kind of product these days. This has in turn led to much higher demands for semiconductors, without the infrastructure to manufacture enough of them being in place.

He also believes the industry as a whole missed the fact that the demand for a wide range of semiconductors was growing as quickly as it has been over the past few years. On the upside, it seems like the semiconductor manufacturers have understood what's going on and they're investing heavily in making sure that they can meet demand, both in the near term and longer term. Interestingly, he also mentions how hard it is, even for a company like TSMC, to progress their nodes today. He's quoted saying "Before, we could achieve the next-generation node by fine-tuning the process, but now for every generation we must find new ways in terms of transistor architecture, materials, processes, and tools. In the past, it's pretty much been a major optical shrink, but that's no longer a simple trick." It looks like the semiconductor manufacturers are going to have to come up with some new, innovative ways to be able to keep making better and faster semiconductors in the not too distant future.

Ansys today announced its inaugural partnership to IFS Accelerator - EDA Alliance to provide best-in-class EDA tools and simulation solutions that will support customer innovation, including bespoke silicon for customizable three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D-IC) designs. By leveraging Ansys' market-leading multiphysics solutions, IFS Accelerator will make silicon technology available to customers to design uniquely innovative chips. Ansys' cutting-edge EDA and simulation tools will enable mutual customers to reduce design barriers, minimize design risk and cost, and accelerate time-to-market.

The IFS Accelerator will foster collaborative innovation with world-leading EDA, design services and IP partners to provide a comprehensive design ecosystem with premium process technologies, advanced packaging technologies, and manufacturing capabilities. "We are excited to announce the IFS Accelerator - EDA Alliance as a major step forward for Intel's foundry ambitions," said Rahul Goyal, VP and GM of Intel Product & Design Ecosystem Enablement. "Together with Ansys and other partners, this alliance will create advanced flows and methodologies, and accelerate productivity by combining our knowledge, resources, and shared passion to drive electronic design."

The first molecular electronics chip has been developed, realizing a 50-year-old goal of integrating single molecules into circuits to achieve the ultimate scaling limits of Moore's Law. Developed by Roswell Biotechnologies and a multi-disciplinary team of leading academic scientists, the chip uses single molecules as universal sensor elements in a circuit to create a programmable biosensor with real-time, single-molecule sensitivity and unlimited scalability in sensor pixel density. This innovation, appearing this week in a peer-reviewed article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), will power advances in diverse fields that are fundamentally based on observing molecular interactions, including drug discovery, diagnostics, DNA sequencing, and proteomics.

"Biology works by single molecules talking to each other, but our existing measurement methods cannot detect this," said co-author Jim Tour, PhD, a Rice University chemistry professor and a pioneer in the field of molecular electronics. "The sensors demonstrated in this paper for the first time let us listen in on these molecular communications, enabling a new and powerful view of biological information."

Armed with more than 100 patents and leveraging multi-decade expertise in creating industry-leading silicon systems, Ceremorphic Inc. today announced its plans to deliver a complete silicon system that provides the performance needed for next-generation applications such as AI model training, HPC, automotive processing, drug discovery, and metaverse processing. Designed in advanced silicon geometry (TSMC 5 nm node), this new architecture was built from the ground up to solve today's high-performance computing problems in reliability, security and energy consumption to serve all performance-demanding market segments.

Ceremorphic was founded in April 2020 by industry-veteran Dr. Venkat Mattela, the Founding CEO of Redpine Signals, which sold its wireless assets to Silicon Labs, Inc. in March 2020 for $308 million. Under his leadership, the team at Redpine Signals delivered breakthrough innovations and industry-first products that led to the development of an ultra-low-power wireless solution that outperformed products from industry giants in the wireless space by as much as 26 times on energy consumption. Ceremorphic leverages its own patented multi-thread processor technology ThreadArch combined with cutting-edge new technology developed by the silicon, algorithm and software engineers currently employed by Ceremorphic. This team is leveraging its deep expertise and patented technology to design an ultra-low-power training supercomputing chip.

Rather unusually, Intel announced its latest chip fab plans not via a press release, but via an exclusive article in TIME magazine. It seems like an unusual strategy, as these kinds of things are normally not announced in this kind of fashion, especially as TIME doesn't exactly have close ties with Intel, nor the semiconductor industry as a whole, but maybe this is Intel's new way of trying to change the image of the company. Either which way, Intel is apparently planning on building no less than two fabs on the 1,000 acre (~4 square kilometer) site in New Albany, Ohio, which should be the workplace of some 3,000 people once it stands ready in 2025.

The article quotes Pat Gelsinger saying "Our expectation is that this becomes the largest silicon manufacturing location on the planet," as Intel has the option to double the land for its new fab site and apparently has plans for as many as eight fabs at the location. Additional fabs obviously depends on demand and crucially if Intel manages to full off its contract foundry business, since without it, it seems unlikely that Intel is going to need the additional six fabs in the foreseeable future, especially as Intel is in the final stages of finishing its new fab in Ireland, while also planning to announce a location for yet another fab somewhere in Europe and let's not forget Arizona. The TIME article goes into a lot more details as to what the new fabs mean for Ohio, but doesn't go into much more detail about Intel's plans for its future fabs there.

Update: Official press release below.

Worldwide semiconductor revenue increased 25.1% in 2021 to total $583.5 billion, crossing the $500 billion threshold for the first time, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc.

"As the global economy bounced back in 2021, shortages appeared throughout the semiconductor supply chain, particularly in the automotive industry," said Andrew Norwood, research vice president at Gartner. "The resulting combination of strong demand as well as logistics and raw material price increases drove semiconductors' average selling price higher (ASP), contributing to overall revenue growth in 2021.

Remember that US$10 billion incentive India approved earlier this month? Well, it looks like India is planning on using at least some of that incentive to win over Intel, as the Indian Minister for IT and Electronics, Ashwini Vaishnaw welcomed Intel to India in a tweet the other day. Some news outlets seem to have taken this tweet as an agreement has already been struck, but this doesn't seem very likely, as Intel hasn't provided any kind of comment on the topic.

That said, the Indian incentive will pay for up to 50 percent of the cost of building a new fab, which we know isn't pocket change, considering that a cutting edge fab can easily cost in excess of US$10 billion. However, it seems highly unlikely that Intel would build a chip fab in India, based on the requirements for such a fab, not only in terms of logistics, but also when it comes to power and water supplies and least not a suitable labour force. What might happen is that Intel sets up something like a chip packaging plant there in the future, much like what it's planning to potentially do in Italy and that the company is expanding in Malaysia.

The development of AI and 5G has boosted the demand for high-end semiconductor chips. In order to enhance critical capabilities of Taiwan's chip industry for this emerging market, the Department of Industrial Technology (DoIT), Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), Taiwan, has supported ITRI to establish the Heterogeneous Integration Chip-let System Package Alliance (Hi-CHIP). This alliance will help create a complete ecosystem covering package design, testing and verification, and pilot production, which will achieve the goal of supply chain localization and expand business opportunities.

According to DoIT, the global semiconductor industry is keen to develop heterogeneous chip integration processes, yet there is no effective solution to realize the high-mix low-volume manufacturing required. The Hi-CHIP alliance will provide a trial production platform to assist relevant industry players in accelerating time-to-market.

The new normal ushered in by the pandemic will not only become the driving force of digital transformation but will also continue to drive the server market in 2022, according to TrendForce's investigations. It is worth noting that potential unmet demand in 2021 and the risk of future server component shortages will become medium and long-term variables that influence the market. Analyzing the shipment volume of completed servers, a growth rate of approximately 4-5% in completed server shipments is expected next year with primary shipment dynamics remaining concentrated in North American data centers with an annual growth rate of approximately 13-14%. From the supply chain perspective, the ODM Direct business model has gradually replaced the business model of the traditional server market, giving cloud service providers the ability to respond quickly to market changes. However, based on the unpredictability of the market, TrendForce assumes two forecasts for server growth trends. One, the supply situation of key components is effectively improved. Two, the supply situation of key components is exacerbated.

In recent years, government institutions have been funding the development of home-grown hardware that will power the government infrastructure. This trend was born out of a desire to design chips with no back doors implemented so that no foreign body could monitor the government's processes. Today, Russian company Baikal Electronics managed to boot up the Baikal-S processor with 48 cores based on Arm Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). The processor codenamed BE-S1000 manages to operate 48 cores at a 2.0 GHz base frequency, with a maximum boost of 2.5 GHz clock speed. All of that is achieved at the TDP of 120 Watts, making this design very efficient.

When it comes to some server configurations, the Baikal-S processor run in up to four sockets in a server board. It offers a home-grown RISC-V processor for safe boot and management, so the entire SoC is controlled by a custom design. Baikal Electronics provided some benchmark numbers, which you can see in the slides below. They cover SPEC2006 CPU Integer, Coremark, Whetstone, 7Zip, and HPLinkpack performance. Additionally, the company claims that Baikal-S is in line with Intel Xeon Gold 6148 Skylake design and AMD EPYC 7351 CPU based on Zen1 core. Compared to Huawei's Kunpeng 920, the Baikal-S design provides 0.86x performance.