When former Samsung executive Choi Jinseog won a contract with Taiwan's Foxconn in 2018, he tapped his former employer's supplier network to steal secrets to help his new client set up a chip factory in China, an indictment by South Korean prosecutors alleges.

Zinsner started at Micron in February 2018 and is departing to join Intel as its CFO.

South Korea's exports climbed at the fastest pace in more than two years in December, buoyed by a pickup in global demand as vaccines raised hopes for a recovery.

ZTE, the Chinese telecommunications company whose brush with death last year thrust it to the center of the trade war between the US and China, posted a net loss of more than $1 billion in 2018.

While much attention was paid last week to SIA's release of final semiconductor sales in 2018 ($468.8 billion) and the percent growth over the previous year (13.7%), there was one equally impressive number that flew under the radar a bit: 1.004 trillion. That is the number of semiconductors that were sold in 2018, marking the first time ever that over a trillion semiconductors were sold in a year.

Smartphone shipments in the China market were down 9.7% YoY to approximately 103 million units in the fourth quarter of 2018.

iPhone XR became the best-selling iPhone model in November 2018. In contrast, last year in November the more expensive iPhone X was the best-selling model with almost 50% higher volume compared to the iPhone XR in November this year.

Samsung Electronics slashed 2018 capex by more than a quarter on Wednesday and warned of lower profit until early next year, calling an end to a two-year boom in memory chips that fueled record third-quarter profit.

Izumo Murata Manufacturing will start constructing a new production building in October 2018 with completion scheduled for November 2019.

Preliminary results for the third quarter of 2018 (3Q18) show that shipments of traditional PCs (desktop, notebook, and workstation) totaled nearly 67.4 million units, marking a decline of 0.9% in year-on-year terms, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. Unlike 2Q18, which grew, the 3Q18 results nonetheless outperformed the forecast which called for a decline of 3.0% due to several factors.

AMD's steady climb in CPU market share thanks to its second-generation Ryzen processors is becoming even more apparent as we head into the closing months of 2018. We've been following this trend via sales data from Mindfactory (as compiled by Redditor Ingebor), which showed AMD with a 45 percent share in June, at parity with Intel in July, and slightly overtaking the company in August with a 51 percent share.

Apple this morning released a new supplemental update to macOS High Sierra 10.13.6, which is designed to address a bug that caused the new eighth-generation quad-core and 6-core Intel processors in the 2018 MacBook Pro models to throttle inappropriately.

Apple finally brought fast charging to the iPhone last fall, but with this year's refresh, one big change could ruin it. Recent reports have claimed Apple will ship 18W fast charging adapters with all 2018 devices, which would be terrific - but if yours breaks or disappears, don't think about replacing it with a cheaper model from another manufacturer.

Intel Corporation today announced that its board of directors has declared a quarterly dividend of $0.30 per share ($1.20 per share on an annual basis) on the company's common stock. The dividend will be payable on Sept. 1, 2018, to stockholders of record on Aug. 7, 2018.

Last month, Apple initiated a Keyboard Service Program for MacBook and MacBook Pro, after determining that a "small percentage" of the keyboards in 2015-2017 MacBook and 2016-2017 MacBook Pro models may experience keys that feel "sticky," repeat, or do not respond in a consistent manner.

Apple manufacturing partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has started mass production of next-generation processors for new iPhones launching later in 2018, according to people familiar with the matter.

Apple could make a major change to the way it names successive iPhone generations this year, Guggenheim analyst Robert Cihra suggests, tipping Apple to take the opportunity to simplify what the iPhones are called when the new models launch this fall.

Looks like Intel is finally addressing AMD's Ryzen mainstream desktop processor threat with eight-core processors of its own later this year. The upcoming "Coffee Lake-S" chips will be based on 14nm process technology, and part of Intel's eighth-generation design refresh slated for the second half of 2018. The chips are now starting to appear in benchmarks although the speeds are merely preliminary, given they won't be finalized until the summer at the earliest.

Apple and IBM revealed an enhancement to their existing collaboration at the Think 2018 conference with Watson Services for Core ML and the newly designed IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple. The offering marries Apple's Core ML tools for developers with IBM's Watson to make it easier for companies to add artificial intelligence into mobile applications.

Apple's rumored iPad Pro with Face ID will likely be released in the second quarter of 2018, according to Rosenblatt Securities analyst Jun Zhang.

Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018 has seen dozens of 5G-related announcements, spanning devices, modems, radios, plans, spectrum, and trials.

NVIDIA has reported record revenue for the fourth quarter ended January 28, 2018, of $2.91 billion, up 34 percent from $2.17 billion a year earlier, and up 10 percent from $2.64 billion in the previous quarter. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were a record $1.78, up 80 percent from $0.99 a year ago and up 34 percent from $1.33 in the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.72, also a record, up 52 percent from $1.13 a year earlier and up 29 percent from $1.33 in the previous quarter.

Samsung Electronics will differentiate itself from rivals in the saturated mobile market with the launch of a foldable OLED phone this year, the South Korean tech giant has said.

Rumors have started popping up online suggesting that Meizu will no longer release MediaTek-powered smartphones, as the company is focusing more on Exynos and Snapdragon-powered gadgets.

The industry this year may see a microprocessor ship from startup Graphcore that uses no DRAM and one from rival Cerebras Systems that pioneers wafer-level integration. The hefty 2.5-D Nervana chip acquired by Intel is already sampling, and a dozen other processors are in the works. Meanwhile, chip companies from ARM to Western Digital are working on cores to accelerate the inference part of deep neural nets.

If this is the case, it would be the first time that Apple has not retained the previous year's model to allow for a wide range of iPhones available at many price points.

China will have capacity in place to run 700,000 300mm wafers a month by the end of this year, according to TrendForce.

The Dutch maker of lithography systems said on Wednesday its outlook for 2018 had been bolstered by a growing backlog of orders. Its products play a decisive role in shrinking the size of chips so as to cram ever more circuits onto them.

Outside of Samsung's Galaxy, the only other Exynos customer is Meizu.

Price increases for both DRAM and NAND flash memory are raising the outlook for the overall semiconductor market.

NVIDIA has announced plans to cease developing drivers supporting 32-bit operating systems for any GPU architecture in the near future. All NVIDIA GPU drivers published after the release 390 (due in early 2018) will only support x86-64 OSes. The decision marks an important milestone in the transition of the PC industry to 64-bit computing that has been ongoing for over a decade, but may upset some of the users who still run older machines or those that require drivers for embedded systems.

AMD has had a fantastic past year. Its desktop-grade Ryzen microprocessors were successful in grabbing some x86 PC market share from Intel, which, in turn, nudged AMD back into profitability. And this might just be the start of the smaller chip-maker's newfound sales momentum. Advanced Micro Devices is readying up to launch a Ryzen Refresh line-up in the first quarter of 2018 on a slightly improved 12nm node.

AMD's Navi has been of interest to AMD fans since it first popped up on roadmaps, with hints of a next-generation memory subsystem and a "scalability" option that might be similar to the modular GPU designs that Nvidia is supposedly considering for its own products.

AMD's next generation Ryzen 2 CPUs are set to debut on the 12nm process technology in the first quarter of 2018. The new lineup comprised of 2000 series Ryzen 7, Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 2000 microprocessors is said to bring higher clock speeds and better overclockability to the table in addition to support for faster DDR4 RAM.

If you thought this was a busy year for new processor releases, hold onto your knickers, it is about to get a whole lot busier. Looking at the release notes for the latest AIDA64 system diagnostics and benchmarking utility, there are several unannounced Intel processors on tap, including a mobile Core i9 processor and what appears to be a Coffee Lake refresh, due out sometime in 2018.

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.