@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20251208

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

- Marvell in AI, Celestial AI - Co-Packaged Optics, Photonics Interconnects - Lasers for EUV, xLight FEL Lasers, ASML Cymer's LPP Lasers - ASML, Canon, Nikon - Chinese efforts in chip manufacturing: SMEE, SiCarrier - Canon's Nano Imprint Lithography (NIL) - China's Xizhi Electron Beam Lithography - Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST)'s simplified optics in EUV - SDCS Research on Parkinson's Disease [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/HPCNB_20251208.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20251208 appeared first on OrionX.net.

Welcome to HPC Newsbytes, a weekly show about important news in the world of supercomputing, AI, and other advanced technologies. Hi, everyone. Welcome to HPC Newsbytes. I'm Doug Black of InsideHPC. And with me is Shaheen Khan of OrionX.net. Last week, we talked about CRN's top 10 hot chip startups. And you could say it's inevitable that a consolidation.

consolidation in this sector is coming. Some will be acquired. Some of the startups will go under in the face of established cash-rich AI companies, and some will emerge as leaders in their part of the market, but consolidation we can expect is on the way. And in this vein, Marvell announced last week, it will acquire Celestial AI for $3.25 billion in cash and stock. And Shaheen, Celestial is leveraging an advanced chip technology that our podcast has, has taken a strong interest in over the last several years. Very much. Optics. Optics is coming, and this is yet another indication, following what Envidia announced back in March as they turned a knob strongly towards it.

What's going on here with Marvell, though, can be traced to the big cloud providers and several others doing their own chips, and Marvell has showed up to fill in the blanks. It's gone from about $5.7-ish billion in revenue in 2024 to a projected $8 billion-ish this year and about $10 billion next year. So nice growth there. It's been doing that by focusing on co-designing high-end chips with and for people like AWS, Microsoft, Google, or others, and also communication and networking, which has been a core business for them after they acquired Intel's X-scale, arm,

embedded and mobile business many, many years ago, and Cavium and networking chip company a little bit less than many, many years ago. So they have been strong in Ethernet switching, data processing units, DPUs that perform networking and security tasks, digital signal processors, DSPs, and optical networking and co-packaged optics. So the Celestial Acquisition fits right in that category for them. There was news in chip manufacturing last week, specifically the defilishly complicated extreme ultraviolet lithography machines or EUV, led by

ASML of the Netherlands, but now a U.S. startup, X-Light, has emerged that is developing new laser technology that etch microscopic patterns onto silicon wafers. X-Light says its lasers will deliver in advance over lasers from ASML, and the company has won backing from the U.S. Department of energy to the tune of $150 million. Another interesting angle, the company's leadership team includes former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who is X-Light's executive chairman. Yes, building chips is like building a multi-story building using atoms. And that atomic precision makes it very unforgiving. Everything has to be the very best. And that has led to a complex supply chain with choke points in several countries, from chemicals to masks, to mirrors, to lenses, to light sources,

in other words, lasers. X-Lite is working on a next-generation light source called free electron lasers, FELs, which will produce brighter lasers across a wider range of frequencies and is more efficient, but it needs supporting infrastructure, like a linear accelerator, which it presumably will leverage from national labs to build its system at the Albany Nanotech complex in New York. They aim to have a prototype by 2028. The X-Lite team includes many executives and staff with distinguished backgrounds at DOE National Lab,

so the connections there are very strong. The current leader in the space for laser sources is a division of ASML called Symer with a C-C-Y-M-E-R, which is a company in San Diego that ASML acquired more than a decade ago, as it set its sights on EUV technologies. Their method is known as laser-produced plasma, LPP, which involves hitting a molten droplet of tin with lasers,

which generates the right wavelength of the laser needed for EUV. One has to assume they are not sitting idle either. When it comes to actual competition for ASML, however, none is on the horizon. ASML has DUV for deep ultraviolet, EUV for extreme ultraviolet and high NAA EUV for high numerical aperture EUV. Canon and Nikon continue to be strong in DUV. Other vendors build equipment for other parts of the very complex process,

like yield management or etching or deposition. These include KLA, Lamb Research, MKS, and several others. The supply chain is indeed very complex. And then we have Chinese companies that are accelerating their effort to be self-sufficient. SMEE, Shanghai microelectronics equipment, has older technology, the so-called eye-line equipment

for legacy chips, and some DUV, but only about 4% of the global market. Sci-carrier, SI-carrier technologies in China, is working on 28 nanometer chips, which would require DUV. Next-generation technologies

that might compete with ASML, eventually, or at the edges, include Canon's NIL, NIL, nano-imprint lithography, which is like stamping the wafer with patterns, but its lower resolution and benefits from regular patterns, like in a flash memory versus a CPU or a GPU. But it is lower cost. Then there is research from Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology

that stays with EUV but aims to simplify its optics by using only two mirrors to guide and focus the lasers versus the current 10-plus mirrors that are used, and that cuts costs and energy. And recent news talked about a new system called Shija from China, which is about next-generation electronic beam lithography. This one is used without a mask versus the current photon beam through a mask, but it is slower as each impression is done separately.

People have also talked about x-ray lithography that came up in our conversations with Ian Cutress a few months ago, but that's way too inconceivable for now. And what is ASML doing? Well, they continue to be dominant even as they rely on technology in other parts of the world. And they also took a 1.3 billion euro stake

in Mistral AI, which made them the largest shareholder and a direct player in the AI space. Well, it's nice to see a supercomputer that's no longer on the top 500 list grab some of the spotlight. This is the expanse system at the San Diego Supercomputing Center, where researchers from UCSD could be making progress

on the treatment of Parkinson's nerve degenerative disease. Expanse is a Dell system powered by AMD CPUs and Invidia V100 GPUs. It has nearly 800 nodes and delivers five petaflops peak performance. What the researchers have done is model how brain cells afflicted by Parkinson's fail to function properly. Very, very exciting news. According to the article published in Sierra Sun-Times, the researchers started with data from rodent models and then ran advanced simulations on the expand system

that showed how reduced activity in a certain category of neurons disrupts communication across the entire brain network. Parkinson's treatments typically aim to replace lost dopamine or broadly stimulate brain regions. But the new findings indicate that a more targeted treatment, singling out PT5B neurons in this case, may be more effective. Anyway, it's always good to show and to remember

that HPC is ultimately for the betterment of human life, and this is a fantastic example. It also shows how much you can do without being on the top 500. Big congratulations to the UCSD researchers. I'm kind of delighted that we've mentioned, San Diego with UCSD and SDSC a couple of times in recent months. Yes, indeed. Obviously, it was in the cart.

All right, that's it for this episode. Thank you all for being with us. HPC Newsbytes is a production of OrionX in association with InsideHPC. Shaheen Khan and Doug Black host the show. Every episode is featured on InsidehPC.com and posted on OrionX.net. Thank you for listening. Thank you.