Latest Semiconductor News Update on Dec 3 to 9, 2023

MACOM Completes Acquisition of Wolfspeed's RF Business

MACOM announced that it completed the acquisition of Wolfspeed’s radio frequency (RF) business on December 2. The RF business is highly complementary to MACOM's product portfolio and creates a compelling combined technology solution. 

“The completed sale of Wolfspeed RF is the final step in our transformation, and we’re happy to say Wolfspeed is now the only pure-play silicon carbide semiconductor manufacturer in the industry,” said Gregg Lowe, Wolfspeed president and CEO. “As demand continues to accelerate across the automotive, industrial and renewable energy markets, we can now focus on innovation and capacity for our materials and power device businesses.”

Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer head has left the company

Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer project lead, Ganesh Venkataramanan, has left the automaker, and report said the departure were that the second-generation "Dojo 2" chip didn't live up to expectations. The Dojo supercomputer is designed to process massive amounts of data and video from Tesla vehicles to train the automaker's self-driving software.

Tesla said earlier this year it had begun production of supercomputers for training artificial intelligence (AI) models for self-driving cars and planned to spend more than $1 billion on Dojo next year. And Peter Bannon, a former Apple executive and Tesla director, is now leading the project.

Western Digital to raise NAND flash prices by up to 55%

According to industry sources, Western Digital has informed customers that the price of NAND flash memory may increase by as much as 55% in the coming quarters. Industry insiders believe that the current increase in memory quotations is mainly due to suppliers' production cuts. However, as the demand for the three major terminals of mobile phones, PCs and servers slowly recovers, which will help to improve the supply and demand structure and industrial inventory of the memory industry. The total memory quotation, whether it is spot price or contract price, has turned into an upward cycle.

IBM releases first-ever 1000-qubit quantum chip

IBM announced that it has produced the two quantum systems that its roadmap had slated for release in 2023. One of these is based on a chip named Condor, which is the largest transmon-based quantum processor yet released, with 1,121 functioning qubits. The second is based on a combination of three Heron chips, each of which has 133 qubits. Smaller chips like Heron and its successor, Flamingo, will play a critical role in IBM's quantum roadmap—which also got a major update today.

AMD rolls out new chips, aiming for Nvidia's H100

At the Advancing AI Conference, AMD announced its shipment of two major new AI computing products, MI300X GPU and MI300A APU.

As an AI accelerator built on the new CDNA3 architecture, MI300X has a luxurious configuration, with 8 groups of XCDs totaling 304 CDNA units, plus 192GB of video memory with a bandwidth of up to 5.3TB/s. Compared with the previous generation MI250X, there are nearly 40% more computing units, the memory capacity has been increased to 1.5 times, and the theoretical bandwidth has been increased to 1.7 times. It also introduces support for FP8 and sparse computing.

Volkswagen finalizes $700 million investment in XPeng Motors

XPeng Motors announced the completion of Volkswagen's substantial $700 million investment in the company, and a total of 94,079,255 new shares were issued under general authorization, with a total subscription of approximately US$705.6 million.

After the transaction is completed, among the Class A common shares, Volkswagen Investment’s nominee shares accounted for 4.99%, other shareholders accounted for 76.51%, and Class B common shares accounted for 18.5%, with a total number of shares of 1.885 billion shares. At the same time, the announcement also stated that Xpeng has agreed to a person nominated by Volkswagen to serve as a non-voting observer on its board of directors.

World's Top Ten foundry companies in Q3 2023

According to statistics from research firm TrendForce, the output value of the world's top ten foundry companies in Q3 2023 was US$28.29 billion, a month-on-month increase of 7.9%. As terminal and chip inventories are gradually being digested, and new Apple and Android phones emerge in the second half of the year, urgent orders for smartphones and notebook-related parts will emerge in Q3. In addition, TSMC and Samsung’s 3-nm processes also have a positive effect on output value.

Looking forward to the Q4, TrendForce expects that driven by the holiday season at the end of the year, urgent orders for smartphones and laptop supply chains are expected to continue. Although terminal demand has not yet fully recovered, the stocking momentum of Android mobile phones at the end of the year is slightly better than expected.

The following is the revenue ranking of agency statistics: