Latest Semiconductor News Update on October 29 to Nov 4, 2023

MinebeaMitsumi to acquire Hitachi Power Semiconductor Device

MinebeaMitsumi announced on November 2 that it would acquire Hitachi's power semiconductor business, and the related overseas sales business will also be taken over. Although the acquisition price has not been disclosed, it is estimated to be about 40 billion yen, and the company said it will take the acquisition as soon as possible.

TI's second 300-mm wafer fab in Lehi, Utah

Texas Instruments (TI) today said it has broken ground on its second 300mm semiconductor wafer fab LFAB2 in Lehi, Utah, USA. TI’s President and CEO, Haviv Ilan, celebrated the first step in the construction of it, which will be connected to the company's existing 300mm wafer fab Lehi. Once completed, TI's two fabs will be at full capacity producing tens of millions of analog and embedded processing chips per day.

LFAB2 will create approximately 800 additional jobs for TI as well as thousands of indirect jobs, with first production starting as early as 2026.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 becomes unavailable for export to China

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, currently the fastest consumer graphics card and one of the best, will no longer be exported to China starting November 17, 2023. And the panic has been fuelled by the actions of Nvidia and major partners on the mainland to remove stock of the graphics card from their online stores.

UK's fastest supercomputer have been announced at the University of Bristol

The British government on Wednesday launched Isambard-AI, the country's most powerful supercomputer yet. The machine, built by HPE at a cost of £225 million ($273.38 million), uses more than 5,000 Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip units, which combine Nvidia’s 72-core Arm-based Grace CPU with the Hopper-based GH100 AI and HPC GPU. That's enough to make it the world's fifth-highest machine delivering around 200 FP64 PetaFLOPS of performance. The system will be installed at the National Composites Center (NCC) at Bristol and Bath Science Park.

Jabil to acquire Intel's Silicon Photonics Business

Jabil Inc. will take over the manufacture and sale of Intel's silicon photonics-based pluggable optical transceiver product lines and the future generations of such modules.

This transaction positions Jabil to better serve the needs of our valued customers in the data center industry, including hyperscale, next-generation cloud and AI cloud data centers. These complex environments present unique challenges that we are committed to solving challenges and provide innovative solutions to support the changing needs of the data center ecosystem. Meanwhile, Intel will not completely exit I/O solutions, the company said.

Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max

Today, Apple officially announced the M3 SoC family: M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. These three chips feature breakthrough technology that dramatically improves Mac performance and unlocks new capabilities. These are the first personal computer chips to be manufactured using industry-leading 3nm process technology, allowing more transistors to be packed into smaller spaces and increasing speed and efficiency. And they show how far Apple's Mac chips have come since the debut of the M1 series of chips.

Western Digital to split flash memory business as sales decline

Western Digital said on Monday it would spin off its flash memory business, which has been facing oversupply issues, and announced a new round of financing to refinance some of its debt. The spinoff would allow the data storage products maker to retain its legacy hard drive business and create two publicly traded companies to satisfy activist investor Elliott, who said on Monday he supported the move.

Onsemi to cut 900 jobs as slowing EV demand hints at sluggish 4Q

Chipmaker Onsemi forecast tepid fourth-quarter results and cut about 900 jobs, sparking concerns that weak electric vehicle demand has begun to affect auto industry orders for its chips and stock price. It plunged 18.3% on Monday.

Onsemi's CEO said the layoffs were part of a larger strategic shift to make more profitable chips in-house and save costs by outsourcing others.