The U.S. Commerce Department announced plans to provide up to $389 million in R&D funding to four companies to support power semiconductor devices and critical materials technology R&D. Helion would receive up to $175 million, CFS up to $85 million, Vertical Semiconductor up to $73 million, and Sibelco North America up to $56 million. The funding comes from the $10 billion semiconductor R&D program approved in 2022, and the government will take minority equity stakes in the companies.
Navitas has introduced a 24kW 800V-to-12V DC-DC power board developed with NVIDIA, featuring GaNFast technology to support the NVIDIA MGX ecosystem and drive 800V DC power architecture for AI data centers. The board will be exhibited at the NVIDIA AI Factory MGX Wall partner showcase at the 2026 OCP Global Summit.
On September 29, South Korean chip design services firm SEMIFIVE announced it will develop a data center inference accelerator supporting LPDDR6 and PCIe Gen5 for a U.S. fabless AI chip company. The chip is expected to tape out in H1 2027 and enter mass production in 2028. The order, valued at about KRW 70.3 billion, is SEMIFIVE's largest single contract and its first project of this kind in the North American market.
On September 22, SemiAnalysis released an in-depth technical report that deconstructs LLM inference services into four working stages—Prefill, Midfill, Decode Attention, and Decode Experts—forming a “token factory.” It analyzes the differing requirements for compute, memory bandwidth, and network across stages, uses Nvidia Blackwell GPUs as a case study, and argues that mixing these stages together loses the structural advantages of MoE architectures.
The fifth SEMICON India opened in New Delhi, with Prime Minister Modi inaugurating the event and saying India's chip industry is thriving and Indian chips will go global. Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw revealed that NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and others are conducting advanced chip design in India, and cited a goal to become one of the world's top six semiconductor nations by 2032.
Lattice Semiconductor officially launched Lattice Prompt, an AI-driven FPGA development tool, and introduced Mach-N2, a security controller product for the post-quantum era. Xie Zhengfan, senior director of application engineering for the Asia-Pacific region, said AI-related FPGA applications are the fastest-growing segment, with overall efficiency improving more than tenfold. Mach-N2 has entered early sampling, and multiple overseas core customers have begun testing.
Google announced at SEMICON Taiwan 2026 that its TPU system has expanded to a million-chip scale, with power supply becoming the core bottleneck for AI infrastructure expansion. Google CTO Amin Vahdat said the AI computing bottleneck has shifted from chips to electricity, and AI has entered the agentic AI era.
SemiAnalysis has acquired thematic investment research firm Citrini Research. Founders Dylan Patel and James van Geelen confirmed the deal to Bloomberg on September 11. Van Geelen will remain CEO of Citrini for now, and Citrini will maintain operational independence. The transaction price was not disclosed.