Bits-Chips

Intel has announced that high-volume production of its first 18A product, a notebook processor codenamed Panther Lake, will commence in the second half of 2025. This timing would allow for the first Panther Lake-powered devices to be released before year-end, although the majority will likely hit the shelves in 2026. Intel is currently sampling 18A chips to customers, but a few notebooks running on them are already on display at the CES trade show, this week in Las Vegas.

In a two-year field test of perovskite solar cells, Imec and partners have confirmed the material’s long-term stability. In sunny Cyprus, mini-modules based on the material retained 78 percent of power efficiency in the first year. “This research represents a major advancement in understanding the degradation of perovskite solar modules in real-world conditions.

Flemish holography startup Swave Photonics has successfully completed a 27-million-euro Series A funding round. The fresh capital will accelerate Swave’s product introductions based on its Holographic Extended Reality (HXR) platform, which will power next-gen augmented-reality (AR) glasses and head-up displays.

Export restrictions aimed at slowing China’s progress are largely ineffective, outgoing US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told the Wall Street Journal. Equating export controls with mere “speed bumps” in China’s push in semiconductor technology, Raimondo favors accelerating innovation in the US instead. “Trying to hold China back is a fool’s errand,” she said in the interview. “The only way to beat China is to stay ahead of them. We have to run faster, out-innovate them.

Jan Bosch imagines how all kinds of resources that are scarce on Earth are simply collected in the rest of our solar system and made available to everyone. Earlier in this series, I already discussed that we’re likely to go interplanetary during this century. Humans getting off this rock and spreading through the solar system is probably the best insurance we have against extinction due to a threat that wipes out Earth, such as an asteroid or all-out nuclear war.

Japanese chipmaker Rapidus has commenced installation of an EUV tool from ASML in a fab under construction in Chitose, Hokkaido, marking the debut of EUV lithography on the island nation. The facility will host the Innovative Integration for Manufacturing foundry, which is scheduled to start 2nm pilot production in April 2025 and larger-scale production in 2027. Rapidus is taking a new approach to contract manufacturing, employing a single-wafer process to reduce cycle time.

US startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has announced plans to construct the world’s first grid-scale nuclear fusion power plant in Virginia. The facility, named ARC, is scheduled to come online in the early 2030s and generate about 400 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 150,000 households.

The Biden administration is preparing an investigation into China’s build-up of capacity in the mature semiconductor business, according to a report by the New York Times. The inquiry could lead to tariffs or other trade restrictions, although a decision about that will fall to the next administration.

NXP is expanding its automotive networking and connectivity portfolio with the acquisition of Aviva Links, a provider of so-called Serdes point-to-point (ASA-ML) and Ethernet-based connectivity (ASA-MLE) solutions. A serializer-deserializer (Serdes) is an electronic circuit that transforms serial data streams into parallel data and vice versa, most commonly found in high-speed communications applications. NXP is paying 242 million dollars in cash for the San Jose-based firm.

The Italian electrical engineering firm Gewiss has announced the acquisition of 75 percent of Tvilight, the Dutch specialist in smart street lighting. The Delft University of Technology spinoff, with offices in Groningen, Schiphol and India, enables smart city and IoT integration by combining sensors, connected lighting controls and management software.