Shares in Lumentum Holdings soared 23% on Tuesday after the optical components maker said it shipped more than $200 million worth of 3D sensing lasers to a customer that two analysts identified as Apple Inc.

Samsung Electronics has decided to cooperate with the Chinese government to develop next-generation technologies including artificial intelligence (AI). With China having been putting pressure on Samsung Electronics due to a rise in the price of memory chips supplied to Chinese smartphone makers, some market watchers say that the partnership can settle a series of conflicts between the two.

Broadcom raised its bid for Qualcomm to about $121 billion, seeking to force the rival chipmaker to the negotiating table after Qualcomm rejected an earlier offer as too low.

Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong has been freed from jail after a South Korean court suspended his five year jail term for bribing the country's ex-president. Seoul High Court upheld parts of the conviction, but used its discretion to release the executive.

Ampere, a new chip company run by former Intel president Renee James, came out of stealth today with a brand-new highly efficient Arm-based server chip targeted at hyperscale data centers.

Samsung Electronics is launching a new chip for cars, tentatively called Exynos Auto, with aims to supply the chip first to Audi that has used chips mostly from Qualcomm, industry sources said on Feb. 5.

Broadcom plans to unveil a new approximately $120 billion offer for Qualcomm on Monday, aiming to ratchet up pressure on its US semiconductor peer to engage in negotiations, people familiar with the matter said on Sunday.

Samsung Electronics is expected to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), a macroeconomic management agency under China's State Council, this week.

For several years, Apple has been steadily designing more and more of the chips powering its iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple Watches.

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.

The new products enable corporate data centers having data set sizes smaller than found in hyperscale environments to harness the power of data across a broad spectrum of Big Data applications such as analytics and distributed file systems.

Japanese chip vendor Renesas Electronics denied that it is in talks to acquire rival Maxim Integrated after reports about a possible deal sent Maxim's stock price skyrocketing.

A plan for a billion-dollar fab in Guangzhou, China, aims to pool investments from fabless companies, creating a built-in customer base. It is the latest addition to a growing list of projects as the country tries to build up its semiconductor sector.

Western Digital gave strong profit forecasts for the current quarter and the full year on Thursday and said the flash memory market would grow faster this year, easing investor jitters that the surging demand for memory chips was fading.

Texas Instruments on Tuesday posted the slowest revenue growth in four quarters on softer demand for its chips used in communications equipment, disappointing investors who expected sales for automotive chips to drive strong results.

Micro semi, the largest US commercial supplier of military and aerospace semiconductor equipment, is exploring its options, including a possible sale, after it received a takeover approach, a person familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

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 European Commision (EC), the EU's legislative and regulatory arm, said its investigation, which lasted for more than two years, concluded that Qualcomm paid Apple billions of dollars to keep it from buying LTE baseband chips from Qualcomm's rivals, violating EU antitrust rules.

In 2017, about two dozen acquisition agreements were reached for semiconductor companies, business units, product lines, and related assets with a combined value of $27.7 billion compared to the record-high $107.3 billion set in 2015 and the $99.8 billion total in 2016.

Nearly three years after Tokyo Electron's planned merger with Applied Materials collapsed over objections from US anti-trust regulators, the Japanese company finds itself in a surprising position: healthier profit margins.

Micron has announced with Rambus, Northwest Logic and Avery Design, their efforts to deliver a comprehensive solution for GDDR6, the world's fastest discrete memory. This first-of-its-kind solution would enable GDDR6 use in advanced applications such as high-performance networking, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and 5G infrastructure.

After Imagination Technologies bought MIPS Technologies in 2013, they invested in the architecture and attempted to build a business around it as a potential ARM competitor. These plans largely failed, and Imagination Technologies arranged the sale of MIPS - and itself - to different venture capital firms in the fall of 2017. Now, the company has been brought back to Silicon Valley, where it hopes to build a new line of competitive processors for AI workloads.

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.

The South Korean chip industry is tightening its monitoring of increasing protectionist moves by China and the US as they are faced with probes and suspicions of price collision.

Toshiba is considering an IPO of its prized memory chip business if an agreed $18 billion sale to a Bain Capital-led consortium fails to gain antitrust approval by the end of March, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

SK Hynix has just made their next generation GDDR6 memory available to customers which can include graphics card manufacturers such as Nvidia and AMD.

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.

Beijing-based Naura Microelectronics Equipment has completed a deal to buy US semiconductor manufacturing equipment company Akrion Systems.

Two China-based fabless companies made the top 10 ranking last year-HiSilicon, which sells most of its devices as internal transfers to smartphone supplier Huawei, and Unigroup, which includes the IC sales of both Spreadtrum and RDA.

In an interview with Reuters, Trump and his economic adviser Gary Cohn said China had forced US companies to transfer their intellectual property to China as a cost of doing business there.

Built on 10nm process technology, the new GDDR6 memory comes in a 16Gb density, which doubles that of the company's 20nm 8Gb GDDR5 memory.

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.

The acquisition has now received 8 of the 9 approvals around the world, with China remaining.

A Democratic U.S. lawmaker asked Intel and two other microchip makers on Tuesday to provide a briefing on the recently detected Spectre and Meltdown security flaws that could allow hackers to steal information from most computers and devices.

At CES 2018, Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua has explained that millions of cars hitting the streets this year, simply equipped with a front-facing camera and Mobileye's new fourth-generation EyeQ system-on-chip, will play a crucial role in the delivery of a driverless future.

At CES 2018 Nvidia has unveiled details of its functional safety architecture for Nvidia Drive, its AI autonomous vehicle platform, which uses redundant and diverse functions to enable vehicles to operate safely, even in the event of faults related to the operator, environment or systems. The Nvidia Drive architecture enables automakers to build and deploy self-driving cars and trucks that are functionally safe and can be certified to international safety standards, such as ISO 26262.