Latest Semiconductor News Released from June 4 to 10, 2023

Valens Semiconductor cutting its workforce by 15%

On June 8, 2023, Valens Semiconductor announced that it would streamline its development platform to optimize R&D resources, and revised its 2023 full-year financial outlook. The plan will be completed by the end of the third quarter of 2023, includes a 15% reduction in workforce across various divisions, resulting in approximately $9 million in annual operating savings.

TSMC plans to increase prices up to 6% next year

IC design manufacturers said that TSMC plans to increase the quotation of advanced manufacturing processes from January 2024, with an increase of 3%-6%, Digitimes reported.

According to the manufacturing process, order size and close cooperation, the price increases of various factories are different. At present, TSMC has successively communicated with many customers such as Apple, MediaTek, AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Broadcom about it.

Kioxia and Western Digital merger into the closing stages

According to Japanese media 47NEWS, the merger negotiations between Japanese chipmaker Kioxia and US-based Western Digital (WD) have entered the final stage. Under Kioxia’s control of the initiative, negotiations on the proportion of capital contribution will continue.

If the merge is done, it will become the world's largest semiconductor memory manufacturer. Based on the value of NAND flash memory used to store data in smartphones and other devices, Kioxia will rank third in global market share in 2022, and WD ranks fourth, and thieir sales of the business will reach 2.5 trillion yen, close to Samsung, according to British research firm Omdia.

TSMC opens Advanced Backend Fab 6 for all-in-one automated packaging and testing

TSMC announced that its advanced back-end factory Fab 6 was opened, which is the company's first integrated automated advanced packaging and testing fab to achieve 3DFabric integration services from front-end to back-end process and testing. The fab is ready to mass produce TSMC-SoIC (system on integrated chip) process technology. It enables TSMC to flexibly allocate capacity, such as SoIC, InFO, CoWoS and testing, improving production yield and efficiency.

Apple introduces M2 Ultra

Apple today announced M2 Ultra, a new system on a chip (SoC) that delivers huge performance increases to the Mac and completes the M2 family. M2 Ultra is the largest and most capable chip Apple has ever created, and it makes the new Mac Studio and Mac Pro the most powerful Mac desktops ever made.

It is built using a second-generation 5-nanometer process and uses Apple’s groundbreaking UltraFusion technology to connect the die of two M2 Max chips, doubling the performance. M2 Ultra consists of 134 billion transistors — 20 billion more than M1 Ultra. Its unified memory architecture supports up to a breakthrough 192GB of memory capacity, which is 50 percent more than M1 Ultra, and features 800GB/s of memory bandwidth — twice that of M2 Max. M2 Ultra features a more powerful CPU that’s 20 percent faster than M1 Ultra, a larger GPU that’s up to 30 percent faster, and a Neural Engine that’s up to 40 percent faster.1 It also features a media engine with twice the capabilities of M2 Max for blazing ProRes acceleration. With all these advancements, M2 Ultra takes Mac performance to a whole new level yet again.