Nexperia took a big step in March, moving from its established business of discrete logic and transistors to power management ICs.A new design centre in Dallas, its first in North America, taps a pool of established power and analog designers. The Chinese-owned company says it is not competing with NXP, its fellow Ditch spinout of Phillips Semiconductors.

与此同时，NVIDIA失败的收购竞标的辐射仍在继续layoffsin preparation for a flotation on the stock market. However another route is being suggested, asSK Hynix looks to build a consortiumto buy the processor IP designer from Softbank. A similar move wasproposed by Samsung在nvidia的出价之前。

Chip design continues to be a key area of interest, withan open source design language based around Python,苹果的移动2.5 d设计M1的侮蔑ra and its Ultra Fusion interconnect pointing the way tofuture chiplet designs.

Ukraine

The war in Ukraine dominates business across in Europe.Siemens is housing refugees在波兰的办事处，而筹码制造商则从俄罗斯退出作为制裁咬伤。这是推动的price of materials such as nickel, and raising the spectre of shortages in chip making materials such as palladium and neon gas. The war has also击中欧洲汽车行业and the sanctions have put paid to the launch of theRosalind Franklin rover that was due to travel to Marsthis month on a Russian rocket.

But March also saw some good news for the UK semiconductor market with the first 300mm fab. While this is not 300mm silicon wafers,the PragmatIC Semiconductor fab in Durhamwill use the same back end equipment with 300mm glass wafers to make billions of plastic chips.

This comes asIntel announces its leading edge, 2nm, 300mm fabs for Europe, confirming Madgeburg in Germany as the location rather than Dresden which houses the majority of Europe’s capacity. The €80bn announcement also includespackaging and assembly plants in France and Italy, a key part of a sustainable supply chain, as well as R&D in France, but the争论资金and support is still to come.