Seagate yesterday agreed to pay a $300 million fine for selling hard disk drives to Huawei, settling US government officials' allegation that shipments to the Chinese company violated export controls imposed in 2020. The fine is "the largest standalone administrative penalty" ever issued by the US Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), the agency said.

In late 2020, Alibaba founder Jack Ma also disappeared from public view for three months, after making comments critical of market regulators. Mr Bao's disappearance also comes after a series of cases of high-profile Chinese executives going missing as part of Chinese President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign.

Texas Instruments suffered its first sales decline since 2020 and gave a tepid forecast for the current quarter, hit by an industry slump.

Xiaomi Corp. recorded its slowest pace of quarterly sales growth since early 2020 after supply chain mayhem choked off the flow of vital components and rivals like Apple Inc. eroded its market share.

For around a year now, Apple has been switching to its own M-family processors across the Mac range - starting with the M1-equipped Mac mini, MacBook Air and entry-level MacBook Pro in November 2020, and culminating most recently in the high-end MacBook Pros with M1 Pro and M1 Max chips announced last night. In the process the company has abandoned Intel's processors after 15 years of collaboration.

Tighter US sanctions against China's Huawei Technologies announced in May 2020 shifted the global semiconductor supply chain in a way nobody had expected, with a flood of orders enriching Taiwanese foundries and changing the island's landscape.

Huawei Technologies took the wraps off a high-end foldable smartphone to try and stake out a place in the fast-expanding category, revealing that revenue and profit barely grew in 2020 at the height of Trump-era sanctions.

Electric vehicle (EV) registrations in the US in 2020 reached record market share of 1.8%, demonstrating increased consumer interest for electric vehicles, according to new analysis from IHS Markit.

While Micron's solid report card didn't exactly come as a surprise, it was nonetheless a positive end to the fiscal year. There's work to be done to get back to record sales and profits, but 2020 at least brought an end to a year-and-a-half-long memory chip industry slump and a return to growth.

A group of US senators last week proposed yet another bill to revive the domestic chip industry, the American Foundries Act of 2020 (AFA). This new bipartisan proposal is the second such measure in a month, following the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) act, introduced on June 10. The two initiatives highlight the effort by the US government to localize the electronics supply chain and rebuild the domestic semiconductor industry now that most of the world's production has shifted to Asia.

Last year, GDP expanded by 6.1%, just making the official target range of 6% to 6.5%.

The Washington-based organization expects the global economy to contract by 3% in 2020.

Both countries' Olympic committees also are calling for the Games to be postponed until 2021.

Goldman Sachs on Sunday downgraded its outlook for the economy in the first two quarters of 2020 as the coronavirus zaps all growth from the U.S.

Asian chipmakers and other high-tech manufacturers face a nearly $11 billion hit to profits in fiscal 2020 as the novel coronavirus outbreak saps both demand and their supply chains in China, according to research by Goldman Sachs.

Apple's answer to OLED could arrive as early as next year

AMD's new Navi RX 5700 graphics cards are great additions to the current GPU market, offering performance that strikes at the heart of Nvidia's midrange. For something that competes with top-tier cards such as the RTX 2080 Super and 2080 Ti, though, we'll have to wait until next year. But when the summer of 2020 rolls around, we could be in for something special, as AMD is working on a card that some internal staffers are calling the "Nvidia Killer."

Western Digital continues to assess the impact of this event and expects the incident to result in a reduction of WD's flash wafer availability of approximately 6 exabytes, the majority of which is expected to be contained in the first quarter of fiscal year 2020, namely the period from July 2019 until September.

Dialog Semiconductor expects Apple, its top customer, to use its chips for a significant proportion of its devices in 2019 and 2020, Chief Executive Jalal Bagherli told a German newspaper.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch said the smartphone maker is working with its Asian partners on a foldable phone.

Details on AMD's second-generation Ryzen desktop processors have leaked out over the last several months, and now the company's entire processor road maps leading up to 2020 is now on display thanks to leaked marketing slides. They reveal what we already know to some extent - that the second-generation Ryzen chips will be based on a refreshed "Zen+" architecture, while the third-generation CPUs will rely on the company's second-generation Zen2 design.

Dialog Semiconductor expects Apple, its top customer, to use its chips for a significant proportion of its devices in 2019 and 2020, Chief Executive Jalal Bagherli told a German newspaper.

China will fill 15% of its semiconductor needs in 2020 and perhaps 20% in 2022. That's significant growth, but far from the targets of 40% in 2020 and 70% in 2022 that the China government has set.

At this year's ARM TechCon, Samsung Electronics re-clarified its ambitions for 7nm technology in 2018, followed up quickly by a move to 6nm, 5nm, and even 4nm by as early as 2020.

As Apple reportedly ramps up work to ship an augmented reality headset in 2020, it has acquired a startup from Montreal, Canada that could help it get there. TechCrunch has learned that Apple has acquired Vrvana, maker of the Totem headset - which had rave reviews but never shipped. The deal was for around $30 million, two sources tell TechCrunch.

Group Chairman Zhao Weiguo told the Nikkei Asian Review that by 2020 his group will definitely close in on Qualcomm and MediaTek, the world's top two mobile chip providers. The group aims to be among the top five memory chip makers globally in a decade, according to Zhao.

Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are expected to engage in the automotive semiconductor industry in earnest as the global market is expected to grow 7.1% annually by 2020.

If you ask Anthony Yen, who leads EUV lithography development at TSMC, how critical EUV is to Moore's Law, he won't beat around the bush: "Totally critical. 100 percent critical. Very, very critical." TSMC expects to adopt EUV in 2020, when the company aims to begin producing chips on its 5-nm manufacturing line.

Google is to open a new headquarters building in London which could see 3,000 new jobs created by 2020.

Chipmakers plan to significantly expand capacity in China, with total investment expected to reach US$50 billion in the next five years, more than double what they spent during the preceding five years, according to a Nikkei survey.

Specifications for DDR5 memory will be released this year, and deployment of the DRAM will begin in 2020, according to a slide deck presented at the Intel Developer Forum this week.

Foxconn has said it is aiming to develop 10-12 facilities in India, including factories and data centers, by 2020, but had given no detail.

China is aiming to purge most foreign technology from banks, the military, state-owned enterprises and key government agencies by 2020, stepping up efforts to shift to Chinese suppliers, according to people familiar with the effort.

Moore's Law - the ability to pack twice as many transistors on the same sliver of silicon every two years - will come to an end as soon as 2020 at the 7nm node, said a keynoter at the Hot Chips conference here.

"Industry experts - even the best ones - are often shortsighted, and sometimes outright wrong," said Eli Harari at ISSCC on Monday. "And therefore, perseverance in the face of naysayers sometimes does pay off. And in the case of NAND, big-time."

The IPTV global subscriber base has now passed 50 million customers, and in the largest IPTV market, France, more than 50% of its broadband customers now subscribe to IPTV.

The 23.3 trillion Korean won (US$21 billion) investment is aimed at developing five new businesses that the company expects to create 45,000 new jobs and generate 50 trillion won in annual revenue for affiliate companies by 2020, Samsung said in a statement Tuesday.