TSMC touts IoT as semiconductor growth engine

Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC has revealed details of its much anticipated 2nm production process node – set to arrive in 2025 – which will use a nanosheet transistor architecture, as well as enhancements to its 3nm technology.

The newer generations of silicon semiconductor chips are expected to bring about increases in speed and will be more energy efficient as process nodes shrink and the tech industry continues to fight to hang onto Moore's Law.

The company is due to go into production with the 3nm node in the second half of this year.

Opinion Last year, the US Army War College published a paper suggesting that the Taiwanese government might give TSMC's chip fabs their own self-destruct systems in case China invaded. At the time, China said it had no interest in TSMC, thus defusing the Strangelove scenario. Now, the Middle Kingdom's talking about changing its mind. It might want TSMC very much indeed.

This change of heart was signalled in May by a speech from a top Chinese economist, who proposed that should China be on the sticky end of the sort of sanctions the West has doled out to Russia, it should invade Taiwan pronto and nab TSMC's chip-churning capability sharpish. Suddenly, the American plan is back in the news.

The demand for consumer electronics has slowed down in the face of inflation – but that didn't stop nine of the world's 10 largest contract chip manufacturers from growing in the first three months of the year.

That's according to Taiwanese research firm TrendForce, which said on Monday the collective revenues for the top 10 chip foundries grew 8.2 percent to $31.96 billion in the first quarter of 2022 from the previous quarter. That's a hair slower than the 8.3 percent quarterly growth reported for the top-ten foundries in the fourth quarter of last year.

On a broader level, TrendForce said this revenue growth came from a mix of "robust wafer production" and foundries continuing to raise the prices of wafers as a result of high demand.

Intel is reportedly set to receive €6.8 billion ($7.3 billion) in subsidies for a massive chip manufacturing campus it's planning in Germany, and the x86 giant apparently won't have to worry about foundry rival TSMC setting up shop anywhere nearby for the time being.

The German subsidies for Intel's planned fab site in Magdeburg was disclosed last week by Martin Kröber, the city's representative in the Bundestag, according to local media. The federal government has already allocated €2.7 billion in its 2022 budget [PDF] for the project, according to Kröber.

Germany's Deutsche Presse-Agentur said the government is discussing the possibility of subsidies for other projects in the microelectronics industry.

Embedded World AMD is bringing to market a new generation of Ryzen chips for embedded apps promising more CPU cores, enhanced built-in graphics and expanded I/O connectivity to drive kit such as IoT devices and thin clients.

Crucially, AMD plans to make the R2000 Series available for up to 10 years, providing OEM customers with a long-lifecycle support roadmap. This is an important aspect for components in embedded systems, which may be operating in situ for longer periods than the typical three to five-year lifecycle of corporate laptops and servers.

The Ryzen Embedded R2000 Series is AMD's second-generation of mid-range system-on-chip (SoC) processors that combine CPU cores plus Radeon graphics, and target a range of embedded systems such as industrial and robotic hardware, machine vision, IoT and thin client devices. The first, R1000, came out in 2019.

China should seize Taiwan to gain control of TSMC if the United States and its allies impose sanctions against the Middle Kingdom like those now in place against Russia, according to a prominent Chinese economist.

The move follows the suggestion last year out of the US that Taiwan should be prepared to destroy its semiconductor factories if China were to invade.

This latest development comes in a speech by Chen Wenling, chief economist for the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, delivered at the China-US Forum hosted by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China at the end of May. The text of the speech was posted to the Guancha (Observer) online news site.

If you've been ripping your hair out about the ongoing semiconductor shortage, you should know that chip manufacturers are at least trying to spend their way out of the problem at record levels.

Chipmakers across the world are expected to increase spending on equipment for front-end manufacturing plants by 20 percent to an all-time high of $109 billion in 2022, according to the latest World Fab Forecast report from semiconductor industry group SEMI.

To help illustrate how much money semiconductor companies are spending on fab equipment, consider the fact that they only handed over $55 billion for new kit in 2019, which means that the estimated investments this year represent a roughly 2x increase from three years ago.

Scientists in Germany claim to have developed bipolar transistors from organic materials, opening a path for flexible and transparent electronics.

The study, led by Shu-Jen Wang, post-doctoral researcher Technische Universität Dresden, built an organic bipolar junction transistor using doped rubrene. That could help the semiconductor industry to make the switch to organic materials, increasing access to a wide library of materials for building electronic devices.

Transistors are the basis of today's digital circuits and, at a simple level, allow one signal to control another. They can amplify a signal, or switch between 'on' and 'off' states, through control of a current of charge carriers – which are either electrons or their positive counterpart (holes), or both.

QNAP is warning users about another wave of DeadBolt ransomware attacks against its network-attached storage (NAS) devices – and urged customers to update their devices' QTS or QuTS hero operating systems to the latest versions.

The latest outbreak – detailed in a Friday advisory – is at least the fourth campaign by the DeadBolt gang against the vendor's users this year. According to QNAP officials, this particular run is encrypting files on NAS devices running outdated versions of Linux-based QTS 4.x, which presumably have some sort of exploitable weakness.

The previous attacks occurred in January, March, and May.

Canonical's Linux distro for edge devices and the Internet of Things, Ubuntu Core 22, is out.

This is the fourth release of Ubuntu Core, and as you might guess from the version number, it's based on the current Long Term Support release of Ubuntu, version 22.04.

Ubuntu Core is quite a different product from normal Ubuntu, even the text-only Ubuntu Server. Core has no conventional package manager, just Snap, and the OS itself is built from Snap packages. Snap installations and updates are transactional: this means that either they succeed completely, or the OS automatically rolls them back, leaving no trace except an entry in a log file.