Artila Electronics is a long-term player in the IPC industry, but unlike most others that focus on developing x86 applications, Artila has chosen ARM-based systems as the main direction for its IPC road trip. Although its products are considered niche devices, the company has still managed to grow rapidly in the solar and power management sectors and are gradually expanding into some emerging sectors such as electric vehicles and charging stations.Mike Kao, director of Artila's IoT Division, talked about the company's businesses during a recent interview by Digitimes.Q: What products and business does Artila do?A: Artila is a developer of ARM-based industrial PC (IPC) products and the company's founders are all from IPC-related industries.When we started the business, the combination of x86 architecture hardware and Microsoft's operation system was the most commonly seen IPC configuration that companies were offering. To differentiate, we put our focus on ARM-based processors - which by then were used mostly in handsets products - to design and develop IPCs.ARM-based processer's low-power-consumption advantage allowed us to create IPCs in a rather small form factor. Our main product line: the intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) gateway consisted of IPCs with sizes of a cigarette box and they were also the first device we developed when we were founded.The IPCs are designed specifically to handle headless applications including data collection and industrial protocol conversion, that do not require a user's interaction and therefore they do not feature any display port for graphic output. After gathering the data, the IPCs then transmit it to a back-end server system for further processing, making the products suitable for device networking purposes.We started developing the IPCs 12 years ago and by then the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) still did not exist and many traditional industrial devices still could connect to Internet. To connect these traditional devices - that can only output data via conventional serial ports - to the Internet, we have developed our computers to act as a bridge for the two, as Internet has gradually become a standard for data transmission.Our computers use Linux operating system. With its open platform and powerful functionality, our clients are able to quickly start the application development without hassle. The built-in web server and Internet utility also make remote control of traditional industrial devices an easy task like managing regular office PCs.For clients that are capable of designing customized networking boards for their traditional devices or wish to integrate the function into their hardware instead of adopting an add-on, Artila is also able to supply only the system on module (SoM) to the clients. The clients only need to place a paired socket for the SoM on their customized boards in order for our SoM to function.In addition to the intelligent IoT gateway product line, we also have remote I/O products, which are similar to programmable logic controller (PLC) and can be used for auto switch or simple logic control applications such as sensor, data collection or power control.Q: What applications can the intelligent IoT gateway be used in?A: One of the major applications for our IPCs is solar power systems. Our device is able to calculate how much power has been generated by the system and sold to the power company.Another major application is the energy management system. We have seen our shopping mall clients adopt our IPCs to measure each store's power consumption instead of the traditional method of having the power company put a meter for each one of them. The advantage of using our solution is that the shopping mall's management team is able to negotiate better terms with the power company as the team is the one managing the power system.Q: What are Artila's main target regions? Does Artila have plan for expansion?A: Currently, Europe is our main market and demand is primarily from the solar and power industries.For Asia Pacific, our business is mainly from the solar and power industries. Since many of the countries in Asia Pacific, especially those in Southeast Asia, have been aggressively building new power-related infrastructures, demand has been gradually picking up. We are also seeing rising demand from Australia.North America is another region where we have been expanding our presence. However, instead of the solar and power industries, which have already reached saturation, we are seeing increasing orders from the unmanned device management segment. For example, we have seen clients purchase our solutions to set up IP cameras in sightseeing attractions and sell the videos or photos the device captured to visitors.Since our solution is based on an ARM processor, its low power consumption and low heat generation are giving it advantages in some niche sectors such as 24-hour surveillance in the wilderness.Our products are also being adopted in emerging applications such as electric vehicles and their charging stations for measuring power and handling payment.Q: What is the IPC market's current status based on Artila's observation?A: We are actually not seeing many players doing solutions like ours and our products so far still have not yet become a solid market that can attract enterprises to form an ecosystem. Although we do not see much of a competition, finding clients is also not an easy task for us.Simply put, instead of finding clients, our business model is more relying on having clients find us.Q: What advantages do Artila's products have in competition?Artila's specialty is actually its firmware customization services. For x86-based IPCs, companies need help from Microsoft to assist them in software, but for ARM-based IPCs, companies need a service provider that is able to write firmware to control the devices for them to perform the functions they need. Atrila's team is able to assist its clients to customize their firmware to best suit their demand.With IoT gradually becoming a major part of the IPC industry, Artila has been devoted to developing cloud transmission technologies and standards. In the past, we simply added networking functionality to traditional IPCs for them to transmit data to a server system, but now we are also offering support on multiple cloud protocols to our devices for them to build databases in any of the third-party cloud computing platforms from players such as Amazon, Microsoft and IBM.Compared to x86-based systems that could easily crash after a few power outages, Artila's system features a power outage-proof measure that can prevent system crash and prolong the devices' product life.Artila director of IoT Division Mike KaoPhoto: Joseph Tsai, Digitimes, December 2017

Prices of memory chips, including dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and all types of flash memory, have rallied throughout 2017, buoying the business value of five of the top 10 semiconductor companies that design and manufacture chips. American and Korean players have long dominated the memory market and none of them is willing to start a price war. Accordingly, memory prices will likely continue to trend upward as the 2018 market outlook remains positive.The memory industry is characterized by boom and bust cycles resulting from the tug of war between market demand and production capacity. Aside from DRAM and 3D NAND, which require advanced fabrication facilities, industry players are no longer so readily building new semiconductor plants, but are instead offering combinations of different memory products to strike a delicate demand-supply balance.Amid the memory industry's explosive growth, Martin Lin, director, marketing center, Macronix, a Taiwan-based company specializing in the design and manufacture of non-volatile memory, recently gave a look into the flash memory market's recent turbulent changes and what its future holds.Widening gap between non-volatile memory supply and demandThe supply of non-volatile memory is experiencing significant changes. According to Lin, "Surging market demand is no doubt one of the factors that drives up memory costs. However, supply shortages play an even more influential role."Most flash memory manufacturers shy away from investing in new plants because construction of a 12-inch wafer fab costs at least NT$100 billion. Manufacturers will only consider investments in new plants for popular memory chips used in solid state drives (SSD) and smartphones, which can create a market value of more than US$50 billion per year and not for low-density memory, which accounts for a less than 5 percent share of the market value.Furthermore, the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007 completely changed the consumer electronics industry. Smartphones, with their widespread availability, have replaced once-popular electronics such as digital cameras, MP3 players, handheld game consoles and personal video players. Lin pointed out that excess supply of NOR flash reached a new high in 2013, causing memory prices to crash. Leading suppliers therefore chose to exit the low-density memory market and shifted focus to mainstream products such as 3D NAND flash.The world now has fewer than five remaining fab plants capable of producing low-density flash memory. What's worse is that manufacturers that used to be able to switch production between 2D NAND and DRAM no longer have this flexibility as they gradually upgrade equipment to 3D NAND production. As a result, the production capacity of flash memory can no longer return to previous levels. Supply has begun to lag behind demand and prices have been on the rise since 2016.Innovative applications revitalize opportunities for low-density flash memoryLin then talked about demand-side changes. After years of development, IoT applications began to flourish in late 2016 with a plethora of never-before-seen uses growing rapidly, and driven by smart city and smart home trends. These emerging applications using low-density flash memory (SLC NAND and NOR Flash) are throwing supply and demand further off balance. For example, shared bikes use low- to mid-density NOR flash for GPS positioning. Home appliances including refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners and even vacuum cleaners and coffee makers are starting to come with IoT communication modules. In addition, new-generation smartphone displays such as AMOLED panels and SiP solutions (MCU+KGD), which replace embedded flash memory in MCU, both call for an extra supply of flash memory.An interesting example of application is the new smart electronic cigarette, which needs memory in order to work closely with a smartphone to gather data and keep track of the user's smoking habits. Around 10 million smart electronic cigarettes have been shipped in 2017 and 25 million units are expected in 2018 according to customer forecasts. The much sought-after smart speakers also use a large amount of SLC flash in low-end and mid-range models. As such, Lin expects low-density flash memory will continue to be in short supply through 2018.Quality sets Macronix apart from competitionThe world is closely watching the rise of China's semiconductor supply chain. Although China is building semiconductor plants on a large scale, product quality cannot be established overnight. Lin notes that Macronix is committed to perfecting its product quality and focused on serving the needs of international brands known for providing premium quality products and cutting edge applications. Macronix has landed orders from iconic world-class customers across sectors encompassing automotive electronics, telecommunication equipment, enterprise-level network systems, factory automation and smart healthcare thanks to the outstanding Macronix brand image built through solid product quality. It is able to fully leverage its brand advantage and stand strong against China's rising supply chain as vendors engaging in price wars pose no threat to Macronix.Looking ahead to future developments in the coming years, the market will continue to face a supply shortage in low-density memory and will not be able to fill the gap in the near term. In response to this, Macronix will enhance its customer service and satisfy customer needs with its production capacity. It will also step up efforts in the automotive memory market with a goal of taking a 50 percent market share.However, first and foremost, Macronix will strive to perfect production quality. With over two decades of refinement in production quality and capacity, Macronix has built a management system for quality control flows that include quick problem identification, reliable error detection and instant troubleshooting using internally-developed systems and analysis approaches. Quality control statistics gathered from shipments to European, American and Japanese customers over the years show that Macronix's quality has improved from being measured in parts per million (PPM) to parts per billion (PPB) in 2017. This will further help Macronix establish leadership in the automotive memory market.Lin emphasized that a growing number of electronics are being used in automobiles, such as advanced driver assist systems (ADAS), telematics systems and Internet of Vehicles (IoV) devices. In addition to high-density NOR flash that is already widely used, adoption of SLC NAND flash is increasingly common as well. Macronix is the world's first supplier capable of providing fully AEC-Q100-compliant SLC NAND flash for automotive use and is shipping such products to major tier-1 automotive electronics suppliers around the world. Further growth is expected for 2018 and beyond with new cars coming on the market.Professional non-volatile memory provider offers a complete product lineup and one-stop serviceMacronix has enjoyed soaring growth in 2017 with total revenues to top US$1 billion and expects future revenues to further ramp up with contributions from automotive electronics, factory automation and emerging embedded applications continuingly setting new records. Currently holding the largest market share of NOR flash and ROM and the third largest market share of SLC NAND flash commonly used in embedded systems, Macronix will have its new eMMC line ready for volume shipments in 2018. Meeting the needs of mainstream applications such as embedded systems, Macronix eMMC is poised to become an important product line in 2019 and open up additional business opportunities for the company.In terms of capacity expansion plans, Macronix looks to upgrade the production of low- and mid-density NOR flash to advanced fab process so as to boost output per wafer, which can raise capacity by 20 to 30 percent. Research and development on the next generation 48nm node is also close to completion.Macronix currently produces SLC NAND flash using 3x nm technologies, which accounts for 15 to 20 percent of the SLC NAND flash market. Its share of the global SLC NAND flash market will likely exceed 30 percent within the next few years as it advances to 1x nm process. With capacity expansion projects falling into place, coupled with agile planning in market differentiation and product applications, Macronix can maintain a level of price stability and demonstrate optimal brand value. This will enable Macronix to help customers maximize business success as it takes advantage of industry reshuffle and rises to the top.Martin Lin, director of marketing center, Macronix.Macronix ramps up efforts to gain market share in embedded non-volatile memory.

With the growing popularity of smart speakers and voice assistance tools offered by first-tier Internet service providers, many have focused on the development of emerging home devices. But for UnlimiterHear, which develops audio solutions, it sees the potential of integrating voice assistance functionality into mobile devices such as Bluetooth earphones and speakers. UnlimiterHear expects the new smart Bluetooth earphones and speakers to be able to gradually replace traditional Bluetooth earphones and speakers.Digitimes recently had a chance to sit down with UnlimiterHear chairman Kuo Ping Yang and CEO Tony Huang to talk about the business opportunity of the voice-assistance products and the company's latest operations.Q: What kind of company is UnlimiterHear?Yang: UnlimiterHear is an intellectual property (IP) holder and currently owns 140 audio-related technological patents. Our main business model is to license the patents to clients including chip designers and makers as well as brand vendors of audio products such as earphones and speakers.In addition to the licensing business, we offer modularized ICs and total solutions that have already integrated our audio technologies and cloud computing support, and provide customizable in-house designed apps to help satisfy clients' specific demand.Q: What product lines does the company currently have?Yang: Our businesses can be summarized into two major categories: the healthcare and the consumer, while Bluetooth mobile earphones and speakers are currently our largest business.For the healthcare sector, our technologies are mainly implemented into two major products: hearing aids and hearing protection devices, while for the consumer area, we have the EarCommand technology, designed for voice assistance-supported devices and can be used in products including smart speakers and earphones and the EarEQ technology that can personalize a speaker or earphone's frequency output to best suit the user's hearing.We are also developing a new technology that can provide real-time oral translation via voice assistance platforms.Huang: For the EarCommand, the technology is designed primarily for portable devices particularly Bluetooth earphones and speakers, and supports short-distance voice recognition. Users simply need to press a button on their earphones or speakers to begin the voice recognition process and the recorded voice will then be transmitted to the app on users' smartphones via Bluetooth and then send to voice-assistance platforms provided by first-tier Internet service providers.Our app is able to support several different voice assistance platforms including Amazon's Alexa and China-based IFlytek's voice assistant tools. Since Bluetooth speakers and earphones have a much higher usage rate than traditional speakers, we believe the product line will have a strong potential in the upcoming years.Our IC modules all support Bluetooth communication and are certified by the official standard organization. We also provide several customized firmware to support different kinds of applications. Currently, our IC module business is mainly seeing orders from the healthcare market and the solutions are primarily used in hearing aids.Q: What is UnlimiterHear's view on the Bluetooth earphone and speaker market?Yang: The trend that we are seeing in the market is similar to feature phones' competition against smartphones.Feature phones, which were the original mainstream of the handset market, eventually lost their ground to smartphones and are now mainly in the entry-level sector due to smartphones' better functionality and diverse usages.The same thing is also occurring to Bluetooth earphone and speaker products. The "feature" Bluetooth earphones and speakers will be replaced gradually by new-generation "smart" Bluetooth earphones and speakers and our technologies will become one of the key drivers for the transformation and help traditional earphones and speakers become smart and accelerate the replacement trend.Q: What are UnlimiterHear solutions' advantages?Yang: Traditional Bluetooth earphones and speakers' key usage is to transmit audio wirelessly, but our technologies are able to further enhance their functionality, allowing the devices to support apps and personalize their hearing frequency for specific users with EarEQ.We began our business four years ago developing Bluetooth hearing aids and designed apps to implement our technologies. Seeing the emerging voice-assistant business opportunity in the Bluetooth earphone and speaker sector, we decided to put our technologies into these mobile product lines to help create added values.Huang: As far as we know, we are so far the only solution provider that is integrating the voice assistance function into Bluetooth earphones.For our clients, they have many options for adopting our technologies into their products. They can purchase our chips or procure solutions from our chip partners including CSR and Microchip and get a license from us.Although we are the first player to offer short-distance voice assistance-support Bluetooth solutions in the market, we still see rising competitions from other IP developers. However, our experience in developing hearing aids has given us advantages in the competition.Our technology is able to filter out noises and collect only the user's voice and will then send the voice through Bluetooth to our app on a smartphone for the software to transmit the voice to third-party voice assistance platforms.This technology is exclusive from our development of hearing aids. There are not many earphone vendors able to come out with such a profound sound technology. What we are trying to do is to implement our professional-level hearing aid technologies into consumer products to create added value.With a clear voice, our technology is able to receive a faster response from voice assistance platforms and also more accurate answer.Our Acoustic Algorithm Simulation System (AASS) also played a major role in improving voice assistance platforms' responding time. With our AASS, time spent from asking a question to receiving an answer can be shorten by over 25%, which is expected to greatly improve user experience.UnlimiterHear chairman Kuo Ping Yang (right) and CEO Tony Huang (left).Photo: Joseph Tsai, Digitimes, December 2017

Aurotek, founded in 1981, was one of the earliest automation equipment component suppliers in Taiwan. The company started the business as a distribution agent of mechanical equipment components such as bearings, ball screws, and universal joints from Japan, according to Aurotek's special assistance to chairman Nelson Chang.As the company grew in years, it assigned an R&D team mainly for the integration of all the related components and supply of complete solutions to Taiwan's equipment manufacturers. Moreover, the team also began offering fine-tuning services to its clients for their equipment, Chang said.The expansion of the R&D team helped the company step into the brand automated equipment field and supply Aurotek-branded machines directly to the manufacturers. However, to avoid competing directly with its clients, Aurotek's OBM products are mainly targeting the segments where its OEM/ODM clients do not have a presence.In addition to automation equipment products, Aurotek is also a developer of structure safety devices for buildings, selling products such as isolation and damping devices for minimizing earthquake damage, smoke extraction devices, and energy-saving blinds.Other than that, Aurotek is also a supplier of PCB depaneling systems, optical communication systems and mechanical arms.As the automation industry continues seeing significant growth, Aurotek has started to devote more efforts managing the variety of products it distributes. Among Aurotek's automation equipment distribution business, 70% of the products are from Japan-based machine equipment brand vendors and the remaining 30% from US- or Europe-based ones. The increasing demand in the market also benefits the sale performances of its own-brand products, Chang stated.To maintain the company's competitiveness and introduce more innovations, Aurotek has been partnering with Taiwan's state-owned research institutes such as Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) to jointly work on technology development projects for automation applications, Chang pointed out.Nowadays, China is the largest automation market in Asia and a majority of Aurotek's shipments go to the country. Although Aurotek also obtains orders from Taiwan, the volumes are much smaller. With the China government's aggressive push of its Made in China 2025 project and 13th Five-year Plan, the worldwide automation and robotic industry is expected to see increasing pressure from the China competition.Aurotek's sales in China ramped up during the past 2-3 years thanks to its early channels development and solid partnership with clients and will continue pushing it efforts to keep up its performance in the market, Chang said.Although the competition in the automation industry is getting keener than before, Aurotek is confident it will be able to play a major role in the industry. Aurotek is seeing a lot of business opportunities from many different automation applications. Aurotek's advantage in customization thanks to its years of experience is continuing to strengthen the company's competitiveness in the automation market, he said. Aurotek is capable of providing comprehensive customization services for its automation products to its clients with the assistance from the R&D team, Chang added.Aurotek's special assistance to chairman Nelson Chang.Photo: Company

Singapore-based Sesto Robotics is an automated guided vehicle (AGV) and intelligent mobile robot (IMR) developer that recently participated in Semicon Taiwan 2017 to push its products into the Taiwan market.The company's CEO Michael Leong pointed out that Sesto's AGV products are mainly targeting the semiconductor industry as the company has been spending most of its effort studying semiconductor manufacturing processes and procedures for 3-4 years in order to enable its AGVs to coordinate with the transportation processes of the semiconductor industry.The studying is an ongoing process and Sesto intends to continue the work so it is able to provide its latest innovations to customers, Leong noted."We are also working with our clients to customize software pre-installed in our AGVs for them to coordinate with the clients' existing manufacturing equipment," said Leong, adding that the AGVs also feature a system to track all the movements to prevent erroneous deliveries that can significantly raise costs.Sesto's IMRs are capable of supporting robotic arms from major suppliers such as Yamaha's Scara series and can support both 4-axis and 7-axis arms.The company also obtains orders from cargo delivery service providers, hospitals and manufacturing factories, but semiconductor companies are still the major sources of its orders and its R&D plan is also mainly focusing on the area.In the past, most companies would put strips on the ground at their facilities to help guide robots to reach their destinations, but Sesto is using a high-precision laser-based navigation system to assist AGVs' movements. The AGVs' laser is able to detect the surrounding environment and then use the gathered data to compare with its internal maps to identify its location and plan the moving route. The AGVs also feature support for Internet of Things (IoT) functionality in order to interact with other automation equipment.For the IoT support, Sesto's software is capable of communicating with automatic doors and elevators if clients have demand. The company can basically customize its software to satisfy most of its clients' demand. Demand for the elevator control is more commonly seen from clients with smaller production bases that need extra floors to create space and Sesto's AGVs are able to easily adapt to such requirements due to their flexible design.Compared to an one-floor building, to serve in a factory with multiple floors, the AGVs require extra technologies as their internal maps need to be switched based on what floor they are on. Sesto has already been developing the technology for quite a while and with continued improvement of the related processes, it allows the company to be completely capable of handling the issue, Leong stated.Currently, Sesto has a R&D team composed of 40 engineers and technicians in Singapore responsible for creating and updating the Sesto AGVs' software and systems.Prior to the entry to the Taiwan market, Singapore is Sesto's main market, but after entering Taiwan, the company has found that demands from Taiwan's clients are much different from those of its clients in Singapore. However, Leong believes the differences may not be a drawback for its business and expects its partnerships with Taiwan-based clients to provide experience for the company to grow and build new technologies.Sesto is currently partnering with Taiwan-based Happy Pole for product distribution in the Taiwan market and has already established some partnerships with semiconductor players in China.Sesto CEO Michael Leong.Photo: Joseph Tsai, Digitimes, October 2017

2017 is definitely a highly volatile year for PV industry in terms of technology advancement, market demand, and international trade barrier. At 2017 PV Taiwan held recently, Andreas Liebheit, the President of Heraeus Photovoltaics, broadly talked about the issues of technology trend, market competition, as well as how Heraeus maintains its leading edge at the rapidly evolving PV market, in an interview with Digitimes."First, from supply side, we've seen very strong business growth this year," Liebheit said. "Take China's golden week holiday in early October as an example, we received rush orders and decided to cancel vacations to meet customers' demands. In September alone, our paste shipment has increased 50% compared to that of last month, and we have 50% YoY sales growth rate as of today. Rush orders and the last minute change reflect the dynamics of the market. For us, we need to be very flexible to satisfy customers' requirements quickly."Battle between mono and poly continues, but mono will surpass poly next yearAt the technology side, Liebheit called it "almost crazy" to describe the rapid emergence of diamond-wire-cut (DWC) multicrystaline solar cells this year. The trend also tests Heraeus' capability of delivering new products in large volumes in a short time.Heraeus announced the introduction of a new paste specifically designed for DWC multicrystaline solar cells at PV Taiwan. The SOL9651D series front-side silver paste can help solar cell companies improve cell efficiency, address costs and stay ahead of rapid technology developments. "For the various DWC multi cell processes, including additive/MCCE/RIE-texturing, our new product can all support. Due to different ingredients, a DWC paste product actually means three products. Meeting the diverse requirements is a proof of our development capability," he said.From the perspective of technology competition, it is expected that the battle between poly and mono cell technologies will continue and change rapidly. Just two months ago, mono seems to be prevailing; however, with the quick rise of DWC technology, poly makes a strong comeback again.According to Liebheit, mono technology is mainly used in the high efficiency markets such as Japan and Europe, and strong in the rooftop market in China, while the US market has both of them. But at present, Europe market is weak. For example, Germany is waiting for the finalizing of energy policy for next year. At the same time, the maturity of DWC technology has brought new opportunity for multicrystaline cells to further improve efficiency. As a result, the market changes very quickly in a short time. As the paste required for these two technologies are different, this makes Heraeus very busy to keep up with the trend.He pointed out that now companies have stronger incentives to invest in technology development because large-scale companies have more resources than before and it is clear that high-efficiency product can have much better price in the market. As a result, PV technology is advancing at an even quicker pace than before.In a long term, cell efficiency will keep improving. It's now the stage of PERC 1.0 and the industry is heading towards PERC 2.0, as we've seen there is still lots of room to improve in terms of material and process for PERC. Also, we've seen the new comeback of MWT technology. Mono cell efficiency could further be increased by combing MWT with PERC.At present, several companies are developing PERC 2.0 technology. It's expected that PERC mono products with efficiency over 22% will be launched next year, and 23% products are to be seen two years later. Meanwhile, N-Type technology keeps progressing. The industry is vibrant with research and development energy.Though DWC is coming on strong, Liebheit believed that mono can secure its advantage in high-efficiency market and expands around 10% of market share every year. Mono accounts for 45% share this year, and it is expected that it will surpass poly and increase to 55% next year and 65% the following year. But poly products won't be disappeared from the market, which will still have advantage in low-cost applications. In a long term, share ratio of mono and poly may maintain at 7:3.Advanced technologies always drive the development of PV industryThe merger of three major Taiwan PV cell makers, Gintech, Solartech, and Neo Solar Power attracted lots of attention at PV Taiwan.The positive effect of this merger is that the newly merged company should invest more in new technology development after they gain government fund. In the past, Taiwan makers had technology advantages over those in China. However, the advantages are disappearing, and there are no obvious differences between them.As PV industry accelerates the pace of developing new technology, Taiwan makers should embrace for new opportunities and dare to invest in important new technologies such as N-type and HJT. In particular, Taiwan is a powerhouse in worldwide semiconductor industry. Companies should leverage related technologies to move into HJT market to gain footholds in the specific market.On the other hand, the merger also shows that Taiwan companies are willing to talk to each other, working out solutions together. As the domestic market is growing, it is expected to bring new opportunities for Taiwan makers. Of course, there are still challenges ahead, but it's a definitely positive development for Taiwan's PV industry.Keep the leading edge with technology innovationLiebheit doesn't think that pursing economic scale is the best policy for the industry, so he is not interested in acquiring competitors in the paste market, given the fact that one plus one may not be bigger than two.When talking about market competition, he said, "Though we are the market leader, we never ignore our competitors. What makes us stand out in the market is that we are the only paste company that develops and produces glass, the key ingredient in paste, on our own. Other companies buy glass from third-party vendors, so that they can't differentiate their products.""We have seen many Chinese paste makers rise and decline quickly. Some companies that prospered once are now in financial difficulties. This is because that they gained shares quickly after its single product was adopted, but was eliminated in half year for losing shares again. At Heraeus, we not only improve our product efficiency every half year, but also keep abreast of the diverse and rapid-evolving technology requirements. This is a high barrier for other companies to overcome.""Today's market is very different from that of three years ago. It's getting more difficult to keep technology innovation. Moreover, every customer may have different process requirements. We need to have even stronger resources to meet customers' custom demands, and we are far leading to our competitors in terms of the scale of our sales and technical support team."Achieve 100 ton locally produced silver paste shipment in TaiwanAnother important news that Heraeus announced at PV Taiwan is that, after establishing operations in Taiwan in Nov, 2015, the company recently achieved a milestone by shipping its one-hundredth ton of locally produced silver paste in the Taiwan this year.Liebheit believes the company's growth and success in Taiwan is directly related to strategic investments made in Taiwan during the past few years. He points to the Applications Engineering Center and R&D facility as two critical collaboration platforms to deliver high-performance silver paste faster to its Taiwan customers.Providing customized paste services for customers for many years. Heraeus has accumulated rich and in-depth process experiences. After one-year of preparation, it officially established consulting business in April this year to help customers further improve cell efficiency."By providing free analysis for customers first, we found that almost 70% of them still have room to improve their product efficiency, and will then commit to customers how we can help them. We have done ten consulting cases in China and Taiwan this year with excellent results. So we will try to expand the business and reach more customers."Liebheit stressed that Heraeus setup a dedicated team to provide consulting service and is the only company in the paste market to do this. Even if competitors would like to follow suit, Heraeus still leads them by one year. This fully reflects Heraeus'long-term policy, "always one year ahead", to maintain its leading position in the market.Heraeus recently achieved a milestone by shipping its one-hundredth ton of locally produced silver paste in Taiwan this year.Heraeus announced the introduction of a new paste specifically designed for DWC multicrystaline solar cells at PV Taiwan. The SOL9651D series front-side silver paste can help solar cell companies improve cell efficiency, address costs and stay ahead of rapid technology developments.

Linde LienHwa, a joint venture between the Germany-based Linde Group and Taiwan-based LienHwa Industrial, is a manufacturer of bulk and electronic specialty gases used during the manufacturing of semiconductors, displays, solar panels, LEDs and others.The company has been operating in Taiwan's gas manufacturing and supply industry for over 30 years and has already grown to become a major gas supplier for many electronics players in both Taiwan and China.In September 2017, Linde LienHwa announced investments in production of electronic special gases at two Taiwan facilities - octafluorobutane (C4F8) purification and filling facility in Taichung, and hexachlorodisilane (HCDS) transfill facility in Taoyuan - to enhance its portfolio to meet growing demand from its Taiwan-based and international clients.Linde LienHwa currently has capacity of over 100 tons of C4F8 per year for use in advanced semiconductor etching processes as well as cleaning production chambers in predominantly older-sized semiconductor tools.Since the transfill process involves repackaging material into specialized stainless steel vessels while improving the purity and validating the quality, Linde LienHwa's investment in transfilling facility for HCDS is sized to serve both Taiwan and customers throughout Asia. HCDS is used for depositing silicon compounds at very low process temperatures, which is important for making nanoscale electrical insulators in memory and logic processor chips.During an interview by Digitimes, Linde Electronics' head of Global Electronics Andreas Weisheit and head of Market Development Paul Stockman pointed out that the company is currently operating in many different value channels. It makes many of the materials in-house. For some materials, the company purchases them from outside suppliers and purifies them for its clients. It also sources some materials from third-party players and conducts analysis and repackaging-into-container services for semiconductor and electronics clients.The company has three modes of delivery. Most of its products are produced, purified, and packaged off-site into various sized containers. These range from small-sized gas lecture bottles, to larger gas cylinders, to tube and ISO containers the length of a shipping container. The materials for the containers are primarily made from stainless steel or aluminum, but can use specialized materials like nickel and alloys to contain more reactive chemicals.Some of its products are used in such high volumes that its customers use bulk storage tanks located on their sites instead. Linde LienHwa produces these materials - for example oxygen, argon, and carbon dioxide - in ultra-high purity plants off-site, and transports them in bulk trucks to keep customer tanks topped-up. Remote monitoring allows the company to optimize deliveries to ensure customers always have adequate supply.Lastly, nitrogen is used in such high volumes at modern electronic manufacturing plants that it is most economical to produce it on-site, either as a dedicated plant or as part of the network of plants in a science park connected by a common pipeline. Here, production of gaseous nitrogen is continuous, and supply is backed-up by storing reserve amounts as liquid. Linde LienHwa and its customers monitor the purity jointly in real time.These on-site nitrogen plants are another way in which Linde LienHwa invests with its customers. Because of the size, cost, and complexity of the plants, planning and construction occur at the same time its customers build their facilities. This early investment allows customers to have ultra-high purity nitrogen available as soon as the extensive pipework for their plants are put in place.The company has been increasing its investments in Taiwan. Linde LienHwa moved its global electronics R&D center from the US to Taiwan in 2016. The company expects the R&D center to further enhance the company's development and to provide better quality support to clients.Earlier in 2017, the company also moved its headquarters of Global Electronics from Singapore to Taiwan and re-assigned executives to Taiwan to provide better services for their clients in Taiwan and China.Linde LienHwa said it is not looking to be only a gas material supplier to its clients, but also a trusted partner. With many of its semiconductor clients aggressively advancing into 10nm, 7nm, 5nm, and even 3nm manufacturing processes, and clients from other industries planning to develop new applications, the company has been working closely with all its clients to assist them to achieve their goals.Linde LienHwa's new electronics R&D center in Taichung, Taiwan.Photo: Company

The launch of Apple's iPhone 8 and iPhone X has highlighted wireless charging, a function that will also be featured in other smartphine vendors' upcoming models. However, besides smartphones, NXP Semiconductors also sees potential in wireless charging for larger-size applications such as notebooks and even home appliances. The company is already planning to develop solutions with larger watt support.Digitimes recently interviewed Steven Tateosian, director of IoT and Security Solutions at NXP to get a better understanding of the company's latest wireless charging development and plans.Q: Can you give us some idea about NXP's wireless charging business?A: Our wireless charging business addresses applications from subwatt to 200W. NXP started in this business many years ago, with engagement in the Wireless Power Consortium and AirFuel Alliance. As the market has evolved, NXP now focuses on Qi and NFC Direct Charge. This combination allows NXP to enable consumers with a charging experience from subwatt to 200W, in a unified and standard compliant manner.NXP provides customers a variety of 5W and 15W transmitter and receiver solutions for smart mobile devices. NXP is a leading player with solutions for in-vehicle charging of smartphones, where NXP is able to leverage its design for automotive strengths and its wireless power transfer expertise. In fact, our first-generation 5W designs came onto the market in vehicles over the past two years. Now the market is moving to 15W because it improves user experience with up to 3x faster charge times. To follow will be support for larger devices like notebooks, tablets and home appliances.Wireless power is a technology area we have been developing for some time. We have worked in close collaboration with the Wireless Power Consortium since their inception in 2008 to establish standards to advance market adoption and growth. We converged early on in the development of Qi-based designs due to the well established principles of the charging technology and interest by device manufacturers to get a robust and safe wireless charging experience into consumers' hands.With the introduction of the iPhone 8 and X, we expect the market to show growth in the second half of 2017 and 2018. We see this as new suppliers enter the market, and as consumer penetration increases to support the new iPhones.With the recent adoption of Qi in new smartphones, we expect the infrastructure for wireless charging to grow rapidly to allow smartphone users to charge more frequently, from home, in the car, at restaurants, airports, hotels, and more.Q: What is the latest status of wireless charging technologies in the smartphone market?A: The two most influential smartphone vendors have now adopted the Qi standard and introduced devices stretching above 5W power level. We see that every smartphone brand vendor that offers wireless charging supports the Qi standard. As a result, they are actively engaged in building out the ecosystem for this technology. This will continue to drive interoperability across devices from these brands. For example, their adoption of above-5W solutions will also influence car manufacturers to upgrade their solutions as well as drive integration into furniture for as we have seen at China's cafe chain Pacific Coffee.The market is poised to grow, estimating 60-160% CAGR for the total wireless charging market including automotive, industrial and consumer electronics. This would include both receivers and transmitters. Our estimates for the mobile market are more than 50% CAGR over the next 4 years.Beyond charging smartphones, NXP has also announced a medium power wireless charging solution for notebooks, 2-in-1 devices and tablets. Initially, the solution is targeting 65W. It offers consumers freedom of placement and acts as a true power source for the notebook for handling things like dead battery and turbo mode. Applications at higher power levels, such as home appliances will follow.Q: What are the advantages of NXP's wireless products?A: NXP has a strong portfolio of Qi certified wireless power transmitter and receiver solutions and is able to supply complete wireless charging solutions delivering fully certified designs; hardware and software; controllers; NFC readers; power devices; application software and libraries; software development and visualization tools; and application expertise and support.For our latest products and technologies, NXP has recently announced a new fixed-frequency single-coil design, the WCT-15W1COILTXFF, optimized for the latest smartphone charging stations. NXP also has technologies to detect and protect payment cards and RFID tags from damage when placed near an active transmitter.Our key chair positions at WPC are also serving as an advantage for us to drive the standard and the technology forward. Additionally, we are integrating our NFC technology for foreign object detection, especially in regards to protecting consumer wallets with credit cards and IDs.Steven Tateosian, NXP's Director of IoT and Security Solutions. Photo: Company

Taiwan-based Arbor Technology has been in the industrial PC (IPC) secor for over 20 years and has always been an important upstream partner of worldwide IPC brand vendors. With automated production lines and Industry 4.0 gradually becoming the new trends of the IPC industry, Arbor also is keenly developing solutions for clients.Digitimes recently interviewed Arbor's CTO Karl Chen, who talked about the company's latest progress on machine vision product development.Q: Is Arbor's machine vision equipment for automated production lines accounting for a heavy portion of the company's overall shipments?A: In the past few years Arbor was in the stage of market cultivation, focusing mainly on sending out samples and providing compatibility tests to first-tier machine vision equipment brand vendors worldwide.We started seeing surging demand for related applications in 2017 thanks to the rising popularity of the Industry 4.0 concept. Other key growth drivers include rising labor costs and clients' increasing demand for equipment's precision and yield. To cut down expenses and satisfy clients, more and more product manufacturers are considering adopting machine vision equipment to replace the traditional manual labor.We are seeing our brand equipment clients aggressively looking to satisfy such demand and therefore we expect our machine vision product shipments to continue enjoying growths in the next couple of years.Q: What is Arbor's vision about the machine vision market's future?A: Currently, factory manufacturing is the main application for machine vision. However, with the releases of Nvidia's deep learning platform, the Jetson TX2 and Intel's deep learning VPU solutions, edge computing will grow to become a new trend for the automated production market.Since all the calculation and logic analysis can be instantly processed at the edge side, in the future back-end servers will no longer need to process every single calculation request from equipment and can focus mainly on collecting calculated data done by the edge side to conduct big data analysis for Internet of Things (IoT) applications.With more hardware and software players joining the deep learning development, machine vision's applications will gradually expand from factory manufacturing to the smart home and more products such as autonomous driving vehicles, smart surveillance electric fencing, service robots and drone, will feature the machine vision functionality.Q: How can machine vision benefit IPC?A: Machine vision is actually part of the IPC and can be treated as a type of sensor. With cameras growing smarter, the development of controllers is now marching to a direction of featuring a smaller form factor and more sophisticated functions.For example, during the traditional image analysis process, IPCs were required to equip with a frame grabber card for gathering images, but now cameras are already capable of processing some simple analysis and image capturing, leaving controllers and IPCs with less work to do and they can have a more simplified and refined structure.However, this does not mean IPCs are less important than before; the systems are still responsible for in-depth analysis and calculation of the captured images and via system settings IPCs are able to handle actuators' controls based on users' demand. Smart cameras detecting defective products and sending information to the IPC for it to control robotic arms to remove bad items is an example of the process of the combination.With more software designers joining the industry to develop solutions for sensors and AI-related applications, the supply chain will be able to expand their product coverage to consumer applications such as autonomous driving vehicles, smartphone recycling detectors, service robots and smart surveillance electric fencing to further enlarge the market.Q: What are the advantages of Arbor's machine vision technology?A: To satisfy high-end machine vision equipment vendors' demand, Arbor is able to install transmission interfaces such as PoE/USB 3.0 in its image inspection equipment and DIO/COM ports in its related industrial equipment. Via its expandable modularized I/O board design, Arbor is able to quickly create customized solutions to answer each client's demand.In the modern world, machine vision technologies' required hardware configurations are no longer as simple as in the past. We usually see our clients' complete machine vision solutions have an overall power consumption surpassing 200W with multiple POE/USB 3.0 cameras lens and a specified image capture card.To dissipate the heat generated from the high power consumption in fanless equipment has always been an issue for IPC players, but Arbor's experience from its ODM/OEM support to brand vendors in Europe and North America in the past several years has given the company advantages in heat dissipation technology and high-performance IC designs.Q: What other emerging technology or products is Arbor currently developing?A: We have products for automated optical inspection (AOI) applications. Eurotunnel has adopted Arbor's industrial-level fanless embedded IPCs to improve the efficiency of its automated and manual tolling system at Channel Tunnel. The system also features machine vision technologies to detect car plates and control gates for better management.Arbor also has a mobile device recycle inspection system that can be used for recycling and inspecting handsets.The company is also developing autonomous driving solutions with deep learning capability. The high-end solutions will use Nvidia's Jetson TX2 platform, while entry-level applications are all based on Intel's VPUs.Arbor CTO Karl ChenPhoto: Company

With autonomous driving becoming a new trend in the IT market, many first-tier IT players including Google and Nvidia have been aggressively expanding their presence in related development. Taiwan's hardware providers have played a key role in the supply chain of the emerging industry.Digitimes recently had a chance to sit down with Jamie Fan, marketing specialist of Taiwan-based industrial PC (IPC) maker Neousys - a hardware supplier for autonomous driving platforms - to talk about the autonomous driving market's status and the company's product development for the market.Q: What is the latest status of the autonomous driving technology development?A: Autonomous driving has been a hot topic in the IT industry for the past few years and car vendors worldwide have also been aggressively investing in related developments.Currently, it is still a long way before we can see all cars feature autonomous driving functionality and drive all by themselves on the road. Most existing autonomous driving systems developed by car vendors are still just driver assistance systems.Before we can reach the final stage of the autonomous driving development, establishing regulations and policies is the major task for governments worldwide and a necessary transition phase for the market despite the fact that the available hardware is already able to support most of the latest technologies.Although many autonomous driving systems already feature self-driving functionality, these systems still require a driver to monitor and make decisions while on the road.Compared to consumer-related applications, we are more optimistic about the adoption of autonomous driving functions in the commercial area. The adoption of the technology from the segment is also expected to be much faster than consumer applications since there are fewer government regulations on commercial machines.We are already seeing broad implementation of autonomous driving technologies in the commercial sector such as industrial trucks and military-use vehicles. Military-use vehicles were one of the earliest adopters of autonomous driving technologies. Since military-use vehicles are often required to conduct missions in dangerous areas, the function is necessary to minimize the number of casualties.Q: What are Neousys' roles in the ecosystem? What are Neousys' advantages in the competition?A: Neousys was originally a supplier of fanless and GPU-accelerated industrial PC (IPC) products. We later crossed into the autonomous driving industry because of our experience in GPU application development.Neousys is a hardware supplier for autonomous driving platforms. All the platforms need to collect large amount of image data to simulate the road conditions. Our high-end GPU-accelerated IPC hardware is able to collect image data from cars' external sensor radars and conduct simple analysis and then send the information to a back-end processing database to share with other devices.We have recently partnered with a first-tier autonomous driving platform developer in China. The developer is looking to form an ecosystem for the market and has been aggressively establishing partnerships with software designers and other IT players.Prior to the cooperation with the China-based platform developer, Neousys also established partnerships with some enterprises in the US and Japan, but not specifically about the autonomous driving products.Because of Neousys' experience in designing fanless IPC products, our products feature better stability than those from competitors. Neousys also has several patented technologies over the hardware design that helps improve heat dissipation of its IPC products' graphics cards dramatically. One of the technologies can separate the heat generated by graphics card and by main machine so the heat does not add up together.Neousys also has a special chassis design that helps minimize the shock the GPU received while driving. Since high-end GPUs are heavily relying on its cooling fans for dissipating heat, the fans could be easily damaged if constantly experiencing vibration.To stay competitive, Neousys continues improving its existing technologies and has also been developing new fanless technologies for its GPU-accelerated IPC portfolio, looking to satisfy clients' demand.Q: How is the competition in the autonomous driving application market? What is Neousys' status in the market?A: Right now, the autonomous driving market is filled with Taiwan's IPC and IT players. Because of its popularity, the competition has been growing fiercer every year. Demand for autonomous driving applications is especially strong in China and many China-based IT players are aggressively investing resources in related application development, looking to grab a share.Because of China's large land mass, we are seeing strong demand coming from many of the country's traditional industries including agriculture. Applications such as manless cultivators have been enjoying strong sales because of their contribution in improving efficiency.The autonomous driving industry is currently still a rather closed market with car vendors all focusing on developing their own systems. To accelerate the development of the autonomous driving market, our China-based platform developing partner is trying to establish a standard so any players are able to use the platform to create autonomous driving products.As for the competition in the upcoming years, the autonomous driving market is expected to be see two groups of players: the closed platform group of mostly car vendors, and the open platform group consisting of such firms as Google. But Neousys still hopes that there will be a universal standard for the autonomous driving applications, which will truly help accelerate the development of the industry.Neousys Nuvo-5095GC IPCPhoto: Company