The sky is falling, Intel may be acquired; major breakthrough in domestic lithography machine

The sky is falling, Intel may be acquired

In the x86 field, we have been dominated by Intel for many years. The news last week really shocked the industry. The Wall Street Journal revealed that Qualcomm made an acquisition offer to Intel. At the same time, Intel also announced last week that it would divest its chip foundry business, suspend its chip manufacturing projects in Poland and Germany, and consider withdrawing from its chip packaging and testing business in Malaysia.

The reason why it has attracted so much attention is that according to Intel's current market value of nearly 90 billion US dollars (currently about 634.671 billion RMB), it will definitely become the largest and most far-reaching technology merger in the past decade. In addition, the entire industry structure may have to change. As soon as the news came out, Qualcomm's stock price fell by 3% that day , while Intel's rose by 3% . However, whether the final acquisition will be successful is still unknown. After all, Qualcomm's acquisition is still a big problem for antitrust.

Ampere may also be sold

Intel is not the only one suffering. Last week, there was news that Ampere Computing LLC, founded by the former president of Intel, is also considering the possibility of selling. This is really a coincidence. After all, Ampere has been manufacturing CPUs using the Arm architecture to compete with Intel. Now we may be experiencing a historic moment.

Domestic lithography machine, a major breakthrough

On September 9 , the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Guidelines for the Promotion and Application of the First Major Technological Equipment ( 2024 Edition )" (hereinafter referred to as the "Catalog"), which lists key integrated circuit production equipment such as domestic krypton fluoride lithography machines ( 110nm ) and argon fluoride lithography machines ( 65nm ).

The catalog of electronic special equipment in the "Catalog" mentions that integrated circuit production equipment includes krypton fluoride photolithography machines with a light source of 248 nanometers, a resolution of ≤ 110nm , and an overlay of ≤ 25nm ; argon fluoride photolithography machines with a light source of 193 nanometers, a resolution of ≤ 65nm , and an overlay of ≤ 8nm .

In addition to photolithography machines, other integrated circuit production equipment includes silicon epitaxial furnaces, wet cleaning machines, oxidation furnaces, resist coating and developing machines, high-energy ion implanters, low-energy ion implanters, plasma dry etchers, characteristic metal film layer etchers, chemical vapor deposition equipment, physical vapor deposition equipment, chemical mechanical polishing machines, laser annealing equipment, optical line width measurement equipment, etc.

Lattice, a new coach

Engineers familiar with FPGAs must have heard of Lattice. On September 17 , Lattice appointed Dr. Ford Tamer as the company's CEO and a member of the company's board of directors, effective immediately. He will succeed Esam Elashmawi as the official CEO . Esam Elashmawi has served as interim CEO since June 2024. After that, Mr. Elashmawi will continue to serve as the company's chief strategy and marketing officer.

This CEO is a big shot. Tamer served as President and CEO of Inphi for nine years before joining Lattice. Prior to joining Inphi , he served as CEO of Telegent Systems , Senior Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's Infrastructure Networking Business Unit, and Co-Founder and CEO of Agere Inc. Most recently, he served as Senior Operating Partner at Francisco Partners . He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Teradyne Inc. and Groq, Inc. , and most recently served on the Board of Directors of Marvell Technologies, Inc.

New Products

See what new electronics are available

Melexis launches MLX92253 , redefining the benchmark for DC motor applications: a comprehensive innovation in accuracy, size and cost;

Microchip released the new Microchip Graphics Suite ( MGS ) solution, which greatly simplifies the construction of complex graphical user interfaces for MPLAB® Harmony v3 and Linux® environments;

Qorvo is the first to introduce a 24V power doubler for DOCSIS 4.0 ;

Bourn launches new BMS signal transformer , providing high-quality and cost-effective power isolation solution;

Littelfuse launches IX4341 and IX4342 low-voltage side gate drivers for high- frequency applications ;

The latest member of AMD’s automotive-grade (XA) family : Artix ™ UltraScale + ™ XA AU7P ;

l ARM Technology (launched the first domestically developed "Linglong" D8/D6/D2 display processors, and the new generation of "Linglong" V510/V710 video processors.

Primary Market

Domestic EDA manufacturers have raised

Last week, Shanghai Lixin Software Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Lixin Software") completed a round B financing of over 200 million yuan . It is understood that the founder and chairman, Dr. Chen Jianli, is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Microelectronics of Fudan University. He has been focusing on the algorithm development of EDA layout tools since 2007 .

In November 2022, Lixin released the digital circuit layout planning tool LePlan and the layout and physical optimization tool LePlace . The tools have been recognized and purchased by the industry's leading customers. In the future, Lixin will also launch the clock tree synthesis tool LeCTS , the wiring tool LeRoute and the logic synthesis tool LeSynth , and finally form a product series of EDA tools for the entire process of digital circuit design front-end and back-end . In addition, the financing news mentioned that industrial integration is the inherent law of the development of the EDA industry. With the support of shareholders and customers, Lixin has completed the asset acquisition and team integration of three EDA companies .

Kaixin Institute, established a company

Last week, Kaixinhong successfully completed a seed round of financing of over 100 million yuan, led by Qihang Investment under Zhongguancun Capital, and followed by several well-known investment institutions. It is understood that Kaixinhong is the only achievement transformation project platform of Beijing Open Source Chip Research Institute. Relying on the "Xiangshan" series of high-performance processor IP of Kaixin Institute , the company is committed to building a platform service company with "Xiangshan IP core customization optimization + advanced process chip design service" and becoming the ecological engine of China's RISC-V industry.

At present, the third-generation "Xiangshan" (Kunming Lake) open source high-performance RISC-V processor core successfully developed by Kaixin Institute has performance comparable to ARM N2 . It is the world's first joint development of processor chips based on an open source model, using internationally advanced new chip agile development methods. The microarchitecture design was completed by the end of 2023 , and its performance level entered the first echelon in the world, becoming the most powerful and active RISC-V processor core in the international open source community.

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