IEEE Spectrum’s Top Semiconductor Stories of 2025

This year’s top semiconductor stories were mostly about the long and twisting trips a technology takes from idea (or even raw material) to commercial deployment. I’ve been at IEEE Spectrum long enough to have seen some of the early days of things that became commercial only this year.

In chip-making that includes the production of the next evolution of transistor design—nanosheet transistors—and the arrival of nanoimprint lithography. In optoelectronics, it was the commercialization of optical…