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TechInsights Inc. is a Canadian technology analysis firm that reverse engineers semiconductors and electronic products and sells the resulting technical and market intelligence by subscription. Headquartered in Ottawa, it strips commercial silicon down in its own laboratories, reconstructs how each die was designed and manufactured, and distributes the findings to chipmakers, equipment suppliers, patent licensors, law firms, investors and governments [1]. Since 2023 its teardowns have repeatedly supplied the public evidence in disputes over semiconductor export controls, most prominently in the case of Huawei processors built by SMIC and by TSMC. That work made the company an unusual thing for a research house: a named party in the trade conflict it reports on, and in October 2025 China barred it from doing business in the country [2].

What the company does

TechInsights' core product is physical analysis. Its laboratories decapsulate packages, cross-section dies, image them with scanning and transmission electron microscopes, and rebuild the result as circuit schematics, process flows and floorplans. The company groups this work into process reverse engineering (reconstructing the lithography, deposition, etch and integration steps used in a fab), circuit extraction (die-level layouts, functional blocks, transistor structures and interconnect), system-level analysis (teardowns of a whole product, including bill of materials and SoC floorplan) and functional testing. Deliverables include high-resolution microscopy images, block diagrams, extracted schematics, process cross-sections and benchmarking comparisons. The company says a high-level chip teardown can take weeks while full circuit extraction and transistor-level analysis can take several months [3].

The scale of the operation is easier to appreciate historically. In 2010 The Globe and Mail reported that the business, then trading as UBM TechInsights, ran roughly 2,000 projects a year and collected about half a terabyte of data weekly, and that electron microscopes cost around $1 million each, which was one reason Ottawa's handful of reverse engineering firms had few competitors [4]. TechInsights now says it has performed more than 100,000 chip teardowns and holds more than 1.7 million images and 50,000 analyses, serving over 650 customers [1].

Corporate history

The company's lineage runs through several owners and two name changes, and it absorbed its main competitor along the way.

DateEvent
1989Founded in Ottawa as Semiconductor Insights, spun out of a memory design company [1]
July 2007Acquired by CMP Technology, a United Business Media subsidiary [5]
January 2010UBM merges Semiconductor Insights, Portelligent and Sanguine Microelectronics into a division named UBM TechInsights [6]
April 2013UBM's Data Services division, including TechInsights, is carved out to AXIO Group, backed by Electra Partners [7]
June 2016TechInsights and Chipworks combine under the TechInsights name; operations unified in 2017 [8][1]
May 2017Oakley Capital Private Equity III acquires a majority stake [9][10]
2021-2022Five acquisitions in semiconductor market analysis [11][12][13][14]
March 2022Oakley Fund III exits; Oakley Fund IV takes a majority stake alongside management and CVC Growth Funds [9]
October 2025Added to China's unreliable entity list [2][15]

The TechInsights name predates the corporate rename: at the time CMP Technology bought it in 2007, Semiconductor Insights sold two service lines called IPinsights and TECHinsights, and maintained a database of roughly 5,000 analytical reports covering 16,000 components [5].

The Ottawa reverse engineering cluster grew out of the city's earlier semiconductor and telecom industry. According to The Globe and Mail, Terry Ludlow worked in the chip-testing division of MOSAID in the 1980s, helped create Semiconductor Insights, and then founded the rival firm Chipworks in 1992 [4]. The two firms competed for more than two decades. In 2012, when UBM put TechInsights up for sale, Ludlow told Engineering.com that buying it did not make business sense for Chipworks, partly because combining the two largest technical-analysis providers would create conflicts of interest in patent disputes where both sides need independent technical representation [16]. They merged anyway in June 2016. Then chief executive John Day described the deal as a pooling of ownership interests, and said the combined company would keep separate operations to respect client confidentiality and conflict-of-interest protocols [8].

Between 2021 and 2022 TechInsights bought five market-analysis businesses and folded their content into its platform: VLSI Research (August 2021), whose chairman and chief executive G. Dan Hutcheson became a TechInsights analyst and later vice chair [11]; The Linley Group (October 2021), publisher of the weekly Microprocessor Report and host of the Linley Processor Conference [12]; Strategy Analytics (2022), a consumer-technology syndicated research firm [13]; The McClean Report, the semiconductor market study published since 1997, bought from IC Insights in October 2022 [17]; and IC Knowledge LLC (December 2022), a semiconductor cost-modelling specialist founded by Scotten Jones [14]. IC Insights closed its business at the end of December 2022 [18]. Gavin Carter has been chief executive across this period [11][12][19].

Business model

TechInsights sells access to the TechInsights Platform, a subscription library of teardown analyses, process and circuit reports, market forecasts and cost models. The company organises its offer around reverse engineering, product teardown, market intelligence, cost analysis, regulatory understanding and IP services, and pitches to six customer segments: capital equipment, fabless semiconductor, foundry, integrated device manufacturers, product manufacturers and government [20]. Alongside the platform it runs subscription publications inherited from its acquisitions, including The McClean Report and Microprocessor Report, plus annual outlook reports, webinars and a podcast [12][17][20].

The shift to subscriptions was the main change under private-equity ownership. Oakley Capital, which has held a majority stake since 2017, describes transforming TechInsights "from one-off projects to a subscription-based revenue model" and puts recurring revenue at 80 percent [9]. Oakley reported that its Fund III stake, sold in March 2022, returned roughly 18.8 times gross with an 82 percent IRR [9].

Not all of its output is subscription-gated. TechInsights publishes summary blog posts and press releases, and news organisations sometimes commission specific teardowns. Bloomberg News commissioned the Huawei Mate 60 Pro analysis in 2023 [21].

Intellectual property and litigation work

The IP business is what most distinguishes TechInsights from a conventional market-research firm, and it predates the market-analysis acquisitions. Reverse engineering evidence is how patent holders show that a product practises their claims, so the company sells evidence-of-use packages and court-defensible claim charts, patent strengthening and portfolio valuation, prior-art searching, and technical support for litigation and inter partes review [22][23]. Its stated clients include licensing entities, operating companies defending against assertions, and litigation teams [3].

The best-documented example is old but consequential. The Globe and Mail reported that the firm's forensic work helped TSMC prove its trade-secret case against SMIC, which produced a $175 million settlement in 2005, and contributed to a subsequent TSMC courtroom victory in California in 2009 [4]. That litigation is one of the defining events in the history of the Chinese semiconductor industry, and TechInsights would return to the same two companies fifteen years later in a very different context.

AI accelerator and memory teardowns

As AI silicon became the industry's centre of gravity, TechInsights turned its lab onto data-centre parts. Its analyses are now a routine public source for what is actually inside an AI accelerator, particularly for the memory and packaging choices vendors do not always disclose.

ProductFindingDate
NVIDIA Blackwell HGX B200SK hynix supplies the HBM3E; eight HBM packages at 3 GB per die, 50 percent more per-die capacity than the prior generation; first commercial use of TSMC's CoWoS-L packaging; two GPU dies on a 4 nm processApril 2025 [24]
AMD Instinct MI300XFirst commercial use of Samsung HBM3; package measured 76.8 mm by 72.0 mm by 4.9 mm, using TSMC SoIC hybrid bonding with eight accelerator dies, four I/O dies and eight HBM stacks2024-2025 [25][26]
AMD Instinct MI350XSamsung 12-high HBM3E stack analysed for interconnect and packaging2025 [27]
Broadcom Tomahawk 6Product analysis of the 102.4 Tbps Ethernet switch for AI data centres2025 [28]
Untether AI speedAI240Product analysis of the second-generation inference accelerator, code-named Boqueria2022 [29]

The memory findings matter commercially because HBM qualification decides which supplier captures accelerator sockets. Identifying Samsung HBM3 inside the MI300X, for instance, was the first public confirmation that Samsung had won a high-volume HBM3 design at a time when its qualification progress was closely watched [25].

TechInsights has also documented Chinese memory progress. In January 2025 it reported finding YMTC's Xtacking 4.x 1 Tb 3D TLC NAND in a ZhiTai TiPro9000 SSD and CXMT's G4 DDR5 DRAM in a retail Gloway DDR5-6000 module, which it called the first market sighting of that CXMT node, while noting that CXMT still trailed the three largest DRAM makers by about three years [30]. An earlier analysis identified YMTC 232-layer QLC 3D NAND in a ZhiTai Ti600 SSD at a bit density of 19.8 Gb/mm2 [31].

The Huawei and SMIC findings

Kirin 9000s, 2023

In September 2023 TechInsights tore down the Huawei Mate 60 Pro for Bloomberg News and found a Kirin 9000s application processor fabricated by SMIC on its second-generation 7 nm process, which SMIC calls N+2 [21][19]. The die measured 107 mm2, against 105 mm2 for the TSMC-built Kirin 9000 [19]. The company's own account of the work describes the lab stripping the package epoxy to expose the die, then characterising it as a 7 nm finFET CMOS device with multiple design-technology co-optimisation features and dual-damascene copper interconnect [32]. The finding mattered because SMIC has no access to extreme ultraviolet lithography, so the part demonstrated that a 7 nm-class device could be patterned with deep ultraviolet tools alone. Vice chair Dan Hutcheson said the discovery "demonstrates the technical progress China's semiconductor industry has been able to make without EUV lithography tools" [19]. Speaking to Reuters, he framed the timing bluntly, noting that the launch coincided with a visit by the US commerce secretary: "Raimondo comes seeking to cool things down, and this chip is [saying] 'look what we can do, we don't need you.'" [33]

The policy reaction was immediate. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told a US House hearing that the department had no evidence China could manufacture 7 nm chips at scale [34]. The Commerce Department opened an investigation into whether SMIC had used American tools to build the part; at a congressional hearing on 21 March 2024, export policy chief Alan Estevez said the probe was still ongoing [35]. TechInsights also identified SK hynix memory in the same handset, prompting SK hynix to say it had not sold to Huawei since 2020 and to open its own inquiry [35]. Existing restrictions had already cut SMIC off from tools needed for advanced nodes, a supply chain that runs through ASML, Applied Materials and domestic Chinese equipment makers such as NAURA, SMEE and SiCarrier.

Ascend 910B, TSMC and Sophgo, 2024-2025

On 9 October 2024 TechInsights published a die analysis of the Huawei Ascend 910B AI trainer and found that one of the dies in the multi-chip package had been manufactured by TSMC [36]. Reuters reported that TSMC learned of the discovery roughly two weeks later, notified US and Taiwanese authorities, and suspended shipments to Sophgo, a Chinese chip designer affiliated with Bitmain whose TSMC order matched the die found in the Huawei part [37]. Sophgo said it was "in compliance with all laws and had never engaged in any business relationship with Huawei" [37]. TSMC said it had not supplied Huawei since mid-September 2020 and had proactively communicated with the Commerce Department [38]. Huawei said it had not produced any chips via TSMC after the 2020 rules took effect [38]. Reuters said it could not determine how the die reached the Huawei product [37].

Sophgo was added to the US Entity List on 15 January 2025, with the Bureau of Industry and Security stating that the listed AI companies were "acting at the behest of Beijing to further the PRC's goals of indigenous advanced chip production" [39]. In April 2025 Reuters reported that TSMC could face a penalty of $1 billion or more to settle the resulting export control investigation, since the rules allow a fine of up to twice the value of the offending transactions [40].

Ascend 910C, 2025

On 3 October 2025 Bloomberg reported a TechInsights teardown of the Ascend 910C, the third-generation part in the Huawei Ascend line, which found TSMC-made compute dies plus HBM2E from Samsung in one sample and from SK hynix in another [41]. TSMC responded that the die analysed was the same one examined in October 2024 rather than a newer one, and that shipments and manufacturing of that chip had been halted since; Samsung said it follows US export rules and SK hynix said it ceased all transactions with Huawei after 2020 [41].

Kirin 9030 and SMIC N+3, 2025

In December 2025 TechInsights analysed the Kirin 9030 and concluded that SMIC had moved to a further node it designates N+3, again without EUV, using aggressive deep-ultraviolet multi-patterning with what the analysis judged to be some form of self-aligned quadruple patterning at minimum metal pitch. It put the resulting transistor density below Samsung and TSMC 5 nm processes and flagged yield risk from the aggressively scaled pitches [42][43]. The analysis discussed two candidate patterning schemes drawn from published patents, one filed by Huawei and one by SiCarrier [42].

China's unreliable entity list designation

On 9 October 2025, six days after the Ascend 910C report, China's Ministry of Commerce added TechInsights Inc. and its branches to the country's unreliable entity list [2][15]. The ministry accused the listed entities of engaging in military-technical cooperation with Taiwan, making egregious statements concerning China, and assisting foreign governments in suppressing Chinese enterprises, invoking the Foreign Trade Law, the National Security Law and the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law [44]. Reporting on the announcement said TechInsights and nine subsidiaries were barred from import and export activity with China, from new investment in China, and from transactions with Chinese organisations and individuals, with Chinese entities instructed not to transmit data or sensitive information to the firm [15][2].

The practical effect is that a company whose business depends on buying commercial hardware and analysing it cannot legally source that hardware through Chinese counterparties. It is one of the few instances of a research or analysis firm, rather than a manufacturer or defence contractor, being placed on the list.

Comparison with SemiAnalysis

TechInsights is often mentioned alongside SemiAnalysis, the research firm founded by Dylan Patel, but the two work from different raw material. TechInsights' primary evidence is the physical device: it buys hardware, destroys it, and reports what the silicon shows [3]. SemiAnalysis describes itself as an independent research firm covering the semiconductor supply chain end to end, from capital equipment and materials through fabs, chip design, networking, data-centre architecture and AI infrastructure, and sells industry models, tools such as yield calculators and pricing indexes, and consulting [45]. Its published methods lean on supply-chain and logistics documents, filings, conference attendance and site observation rather than lab work [45].

The two therefore tend to answer different questions. A TechInsights report can establish which foundry made a specific die in a specific shipping product. A SemiAnalysis report is more likely to estimate how many such units exist, what they cost, and where the bottleneck is. Both are cited in the same news stories, and neither publishes the other's kind of evidence.

Disputes and criticism

Contested findings are an occupational hazard for a firm whose reports carry regulatory consequences. TSMC and Huawei both disputed the implications of the October 2024 Ascend 910B analysis, TSMC saying it had not supplied Huawei since September 2020 and Huawei saying it had produced no chips via TSMC after the 2020 export rules [38]. In 2025 TSMC argued that the dies in the Ascend 910C teardown were not newly manufactured but the same ones already examined a year earlier [41]. None of these responses challenged TechInsights' identification of the dies themselves.

The South China Morning Post, reporting China's entity-list decision, quoted independent analyst Chen Jia describing TechInsights reports as attracting attention for "aggressive viewpoints and bold content" and warning that "unauthorised teardowns would bring risk and legal issues given the intensified tech war" [2]. That is a live question for the whole business: reverse engineering for interoperability and patent enforcement is broadly lawful in the firm's home jurisdictions, but the geopolitical exposure is new.

The other documented criticism concerns market structure. The 2016 combination of TechInsights and Chipworks merged the two largest independent reverse engineering houses, in a field where opposing parties in a patent dispute each need independent technical analysis. Ludlow had named exactly that conflict problem in 2012 as a reason the deal did not make sense [16], and the merged company addressed it by keeping separate operations under conflict-of-interest protocols [8]. Beyond these points, no sustained public record of retracted findings or successful legal challenges to TechInsights' technical conclusions was found.

References

  1. ^TechInsights, "About Us." techinsights.com/about-techinsights
  2. ^South China Morning Post, "Beijing targets consultancy that does teardown reports on Huawei chips as tech war widens," 9 October 2025. scmp.com/...n-reports-huawei-chips-tech-war-widens
  3. ^TechInsights, "Reverse Engineering Solutions." techinsights.com/...reverse-engineering
  4. ^The Globe and Mail, "An industry built on tearing things apart," 1 December 2010. theglobeandmail.com/...article1318476
  5. ^CMP Technology, "CMP Technology Acquires Semiconductor Insights, Premier Provider of Technical and Intellectual Property Information to the Global Semiconductor Industry," 27 July 2007. ubmchannelnews.mediaroom.com
  6. ^PR Newswire, "UBM TechInsights Merger Creates Leader in Technical Analysis and Intellectual Property Management," 19 January 2010. prnewswire.com/...ual-property-management-82061612
  7. ^Unquote, "Epiris sells TechInsights to Oakley in final exit from Axio." unquote.com/...s-to-oakley-in-final-exit-from-axio
  8. ^IAM, "In a major IP market move TechInsights and Chipworks announce that they are joining forces," 2 June 2016. iam-media.com/...-announce-they-are-joining-forces
  9. ^Oakley Capital, "TechInsights" portfolio page. oakleycapital.com/...techinsights
  10. ^Private Equity Wire, "Oakley Capital acquires TechInsights." privateequitywire.co.uk/...l-acquires-techinsights
  11. ^Newsfile, "Innovation Decisions Accelerated: TechInsights Acquires VLSI Research," 16 August 2021. newsfilecorp.com/...nsights-Acquires-VLSI-Research
  12. ^TechInsights, "TechInsights Acquires The Linley Group to Further Expand Its Platform of Semiconductor Content," 14 October 2021. techinsights.com/...platform-semiconductor-content
  13. ^CVC, "TechInsights acquires Strategy Analytics," 27 June 2022. cvc.com/...echinsights-acquires-strategy-analytics
  14. ^Business Wire, "TechInsights Acquires IC Knowledge LLC in a Further Expansion of Its Platform of Semiconductor Market Analysis Content," 1 December 2022. businesswire.com/...ductor-Market-Analysis-Content
  15. ^Global Times, "China adds 23 foreign entities to unreliable entity list to safeguard national sovereignty, security, and development interests," October 2025. globaltimes.cn/...1345245.shtml
  16. ^Engineering.com, "More About the UBM TechInsights Sale," October 2012. engineering.com/more-about-the-ubm-techinsights-sale
  17. ^TechInsights, "TechInsights acquires The McClean Report from IC Insights," October 2022. techinsights.com/...cclean-report-from-ic-insights
  18. ^Electronic Specifier, "After 25 years, IC Insights closes its business on December 30, 2022." electronicspecifier.com/...ess-on-december-30-2022
  19. ^TechInsights, "TechInsights Finds SMIC 7nm (N+2) in Huawei Mate 60 Pro," September 2023. techinsights.com/...smic-7nm-n2-huawei-mate-60-pro
  20. ^TechInsights, company homepage. techinsights.com
  21. ^Bloomberg, "Look Inside Huawei Mate 60 Pro Phone Powered by Made-in-China Chip," 4 September 2023. bloomberg.com/...one-powered-by-made-in-china-chip
  22. ^TechInsights, "Intellectual Property Services." techinsights.com/...intellectual-property-services
  23. ^TechInsights, "Evidence of Use." techinsights.com/...evidence-of-use
  24. ^GlobeNewswire, "TechInsights Releases Initial Findings of its NVIDIA Blackwell HGX B200 Platform Teardown," 14 April 2025. globenewswire.com/...ll-HGX-B200-Platform-Teardown
  25. ^TechInsights, "TechInsights' Analysis of AMD's MI300X Reveals Samsung HBM3." techinsights.com/...ds-mi300x-reveals-samsung-hbm3
  26. ^TechInsights, "AMD Instinct MI300X Processor Floorplan Analysis." techinsights.com/...x-processor-floorplan-analysis
  27. ^TechInsights, "Samsung 12Hi HBM from AMD MI350X Interconnect and Packaging Analysis." techinsights.com/...connect-and-packaging-analysis
  28. ^TechInsights, "Broadcom Tomahawk 6: 102.4 Tbps Ethernet Switch for AI Data Centers." techinsights.com/...thernet-switch-ai-data-centers
  29. ^TechInsights, "Untether Boqueria Targets AI Lead." techinsights.com/...ether-boqueria-targets-ai-lead
  30. ^TechInsights, "China Enters 2025 with Big Memory Breakthroughs," January 2025. techinsights.com/...-2025-big-memory-breakthroughs
  31. ^TechInsights, "YMTC YMN0AQF1B1HCAD 232-Layer QLC 3D NAND Flash Memory Floorplan Analysis." techinsights.com/...lash-memory-floorplan-analysis
  32. ^G. Dan Hutcheson, The Chip Insider, TechInsights, "Huawei Strikes Back: What TechInsights found, how it did it, why it matters, and what it means," September 2023. techinsights.com/...y-it-matters-and-what-it-means
  33. ^Reuters, "Teardown of Huawei's new phone shows China's chip breakthrough," 5 September 2023. malaymail.com/...89044
  34. ^Bloomberg, "Raimondo: No Evidence China Can Make 7nm Chips at Scale," 20 September 2023. bloomberg.com/...can-make-7nm-chips-at-scale-video
  35. ^SDxCentral, "US government still investigating alleged chip sanctions breach by SMIC," 22 March 2024. sdxcentral.com/...ed-chip-sanctions-breach-by-smic
  36. ^TechInsights, "Huawei Ascend 910B AI Trainer, Die Analysis," 9 October 2024. library.techinsights.com/...4e9e-a82b-a6702a8757df
  37. ^Reuters, "TSMC suspended shipments to China firm after chip found on Huawei processor, sources say," 27 October 2024. malaymail.com/...155003
  38. ^South China Morning Post, "Tech war: TSMC chips found in Huawei's AI processors open firms to fresh scrutiny," 23 October 2024. scmp.com/...i-processors-open-firms-fresh-scrutiny
  39. ^Bureau of Industry and Security, "Commerce Strengthens Restrictions on Advanced Computing Semiconductors to Enhance Foundry Due Diligence and Prevent Diversion," 15 January 2025. bis.gov/...s-enhance-foundry-due-diligence-prevent
  40. ^The Register, "TSMC may face $1B+ penalty for suspected Huawei exports," 8 April 2025. theregister.com/...tsmc_blew_whistle_on_chinese
  41. ^Bloomberg via Investing.com, "Huawei used components from large Asian tech names in leading AI chips," 3 October 2025. investing.com/...ading-ai-chips--bloomberg-4270012
  42. ^SemiWiki, republishing TechInsights, "Kirin 9030 Hints at SMIC's Possible Paths Toward >300 MTr/mm2 Without EUV," 28 December 2025. semiwiki.com/...ths-toward-300-mtr-mm2-without-euv
  43. ^TechInsights, "SMIC Steps Toward 5nm: Kirin 9030 Analysis Shows the Foundry's N+3 Progress," December 2025. library.techinsights.com/...FCT-2512-802
  44. ^Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China, "MOFCOM Spokesperson's Remarks on Measures Concerning the Unreliable Entity List," October 2025. english.mofcom.gov.cn/...16ddb475cb3a9b51a025887c9
  45. ^SemiAnalysis, "About." semianalysis.com/about

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