The company signed the preliminary agreement with South Chungcheong Province to invest some KRW480 billion (US$449 million) for the expansion of its plant in Cheonan, some 80 kilometers south of Seoul, for 300mm silicon wafer, the provincial government said.

Though Qualcomm first evaluated non-headcount expense reductions, it concluded that a workforce reduction is needed to support long-term growth and success, a company spokesperson said.

Facebook is building a team to design its own semiconductors, adding to a trend among technology companies to supply themselves and lower their dependence on chipmakers such as Intel and Qualcomm.

As a result, without any products to sell and missing the crucial 5G transition revolution, we expect ZTE, a publicly traded company on the Hong-Kong and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges, to file for bankruptcy in the next few weeks.

China's economy grew at an annual pace of 6.8% in the first quarter compared to the same period last year, according to official data, beating forecasts for the period. The growth figures for January to March were also above Beijing's 2018 annual growth target of "around 6.5%".

Apple is set to start the production of the OLED screens for 2018's new iPhones next month. This will see Tim Cook continue his strategy of sacrificing market share and sales numbers to maintain higher margins and more expensive iOS-powered smartphones.

Samsung Electronics can continue manufacturing and selling smartphones in China while it battles Huawei Technologies over patent royalties, a US judge has ruled. The order by a federal judge in San Francisco blocks Huawei from enforcing a decision by a Chinese court, which ruled Samsung is infringing two Huawei patents.

China's Alibaba Group has been testing its own autonomous vehicle technology, the South China Morning Post reports, and is looking to hire an additional 50 self-driving vehicle experts. Alibaba's rivals Baidu and Tencent have also been working on autonomous technology.

Tesla is temporarily stopping production of its Model 3 electric car, amid a long waiting list and several missed targets. The company, however, says the shutdown is intended to resolve some of the problems that have contributed to the numerous delays in getting the cars to hundreds of thousands of reservation holders.

The Commerce Department on Monday barred US companies from exporting to Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE for seven years, saying the company had violated a previous settlement of criminal and civil charges for making illegal shipments to Iran and North Korea.

China is slowing reviews of multibillion-dollar takeover deals being pursued by Qualcomm and Bain Capital, people familiar with the matter say, as US-China trade tensions escalate.

7nm+ design libraries are not available yet, and thus design engineers at Apple, Nvidia or Qualcomm (to mention a few) are not expected to have a holistic (to borrow the terminology from ASML) view on cost/ benefits of 7nm+ with EUV.

US President Donald Trump has said he will only join the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) if the deal is "substantially better" than the one offered to President Barack Obama. The TPP is the free trade pact with primarily Asia-Pacific nations that Trump backed out of last year.

Computer scientists are contemplating their own "A-Bomb moment." Facebook's carelessness with user data, and attacks the company has enabled against western democracies, are on software engineers' consciences.

Global foundries and Toppan Photomasks have announced a multi-year extension to their Advanced Mask Technology Center (AMTC) joint venture in Dresden, Germany.

Paul Jacobs, the ousted chairman of Qualcomm, is making progress in lining up enough funding to offer to take the chipmaker private, and could make the bid within a few months, according to a person familiar with his plans.

Qualcomm's vision intelligence platform features the company's first family of system-on-chips (SoCs) purpose-built for the Internet of Things (IoT) using 10nm FinFET process technology.

Nvidia cracked the list of top 10 semiconductor vendors by sales for the first time in 2017, joining Qualcomm as the only other strictly fabless chip supplier to attain that distinction last year, according to market research firm IHS Markit.

Samsung is producing ASIC chips for upstart mining hardware manufacturer Halong Mining, at least according to one mining rig distributor.

Google is teaming up with the American Medical Association, a physician lobbying group, on a plan to get start-ups to come up with the "best new ideas for fostering data sharing from health monitoring devices."

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told USA TODAY he's leaving Facebook out of growing concern for the carelessness with which Facebook and other Internet companies treat the private information of users.

Intel has decided to kill the Intel Remote Keyboard app for Android and iOS devices in order to protect user devices from three vulnerabilities - one of which was classified as "critical". The chip maker has also issued a Product Discontinuation notice to recommend users to uninstall the app from their devices. The app was notably launched by the company in 2015 to let users wirelessly control their Intel NUC (next unit of computing) and Intel Compute Stick computers and transform their smartphones or tablets into a virtual keyboard and mouse.

Bitmain has announced the Antminer E3, which is an ASIC miner engineered for mining Ethereum.

Intel introduced new 8th Gen Intel Core vPro processors, the Intel Core processor family and Intel Xeon E-2100M processors designed for mobile workstations. Engineered to help make digital transformation real, organizations of all sizes can upgrade their fleets with these latest processors to optimize productivity with Windows 10 and help protect company assets, while also managing costs.

At a global event in Beijing, Intel unveiled the first ever Intel Core i9 processor for laptops. Part of the new lineup of high-performance mobile products unveiled, the powerful 8th Gen Intel Core i9 processor is the highest-performance laptop processor Intel has ever built to deliver the best gaming and content creation experience on the go.

The combined product portfolio and future common platforms of UnitySC and HSEB will support manufacturing of devices used in mobility, automotive and internet of things applications.

Google today announced an expansion of its Rolling Study Halls initiative to over 16 additional school districts, giving "thousands" of students access to Wi-Fi and Chromebooks on their buses. Google has piloted the program in North Carolina and South Carolina over the last couple years, focusing its efforts on rural communities where some students have lengthy bus rides between home and the classroom each day.

For years, PC gamers have needed to pick a poison: Buy a desktop with the most powerful components available, or sacrifice some performance for a laptop they could take on the road. Intel's new six-core mobile Core i9 chip, its fastest notebook CPU ever, paves the way for 5GHz gaming laptops, making that decision even tougher.

These new laptops combine the processing power of Intel's Core processors with AMD's Vega graphics.

China's finance ministry said on Friday it has introduced tax breaks for chipmakers made in the country, at a time when the government is seeking to reduce dependence on foreign semiconductors amid trade tensions with the United States over technology transfers.

GDDR6 memory manufacturing schedules give reason to believe that Nvidia is targeting a July launch for its GeForce 11 series, or somewhere shortly after.

Samsung is now the largest patent holder in the United States, boasting a portfolio of 75,596 valid patents in the country as of January 1.

Intel is exploring the creation of specialty hardware for mining the popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

Move would be major blow to Intel, Apple's Mac chip supplier.

Fueled by heavy government investment, IC packaging and testing in China generated $29 billion in revenue in 2017.

The Chinese owners of Imagination Technologies have drafted in a microchip industry veteran from a Beijing-backed technology conglomerate, after buying the British company last year.

On Friday, Google announced that it would be ending support for its goo.gl URL shortening service. Google's Michael Hermanto said that starting April 13, anyone who had not used goo.gl before March 31 would not be allowed to create new short links. Existing users will have access to the service for one year before it will be completely shut down on March 30, 2019. While the service will be dismantled, existing URLs will still redirect to the appropriate location.

The details about this year's OnePlus 6 are starting to come into a more exciting focus.