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.
Intel Senior Vice President Cho Min-sung said at a semiconductor-humanoid robot conference in South Korea that Intel plans to release "Nova Lake" for physical AI in early 2027, followed by "Razor Lake AX" in 2028 with platform computing power of up to 700 TOPS, notably higher than Panther Lake's 180 TOPS.
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.
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.