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Jul 7
US ruling confirms Innoscience infringed Infineon's GaN patents, imposes import ban

The US International Trade Commission's final determination against Innoscience has been upheld following the conclusion of the Presidential Review Period, confirming that the Chinese GaN chipmaker infringed a patent held by Germany's Infineon Technologies.

As AI demand drives record price increases in the memory market, the aftermath of such volatility is weighing on the wider supply chain, rippling into downstream industries where manufacturers are already trapped in their own price wars while facing rising input costs.

TSMC's July 16 earnings call is likely to test how far the chipmaker can extend its already upbeat guidance, as investors look for signs that AI demand, flagship smartphone launches, and broader wafer orders can offset inflation, materials shortages, and mounting manufacturing complexity. The market is watching for another upgrade to revenue, spending, and margin targets.

The Netherlands used a trade mission to Beijing this week to reopen economic ties with China while semiconductor tensions remained at the center of the agenda. Dutch trade officials met Chinese counterparts as Amsterdam sought to manage disputes involving Nexperia and ASML amid broader US-China technology restrictions.
As AI infrastructure chip orders flood in and TSMC runs near nonstop, academia has found it difficult to carry out industry-academia collaboration with the world's top foundry house. Taiwan's government-funded research institutes, including the National Institutes of Applied Research (NIAR) and Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), are emerging as a better route for partnerships.

Samsung Electronics has started mass production of its PM1763 enterprise SSD, a PCIe 6.0-based drive built for AI infrastructure and slated for Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin platform, expanding the company's AI memory strategy beyond HBM into high-performance server storage.

As AI workloads pivot toward emerging needs for systems that can perform tasks with a coordinated balance between speed and control, the hardware race is moving beyond GPUs. While the critical role GPUs have played across the AI compute landscape is not in doubt, the expansion of inference, reasoning, and agentic AI is placing CPUs back at the center of the AI hardware race.

Samsung Electronics is using HBM4 to test whether its memory, logic, foundry, and advanced packaging businesses can finally work as one AI semiconductor platform, turning a broad portfolio into a clearer competitive weapon.

China's CXMT has moved from a little-known state-backed DRAM maker to one of the most closely watched companies in the global memory chip race, with Apple testing its chips for China-market devices and Beijing counting on the company to anchor a domestic AI supply chain.

AI servers are tightening Taiwan's power component supply chain, lifting demand for MOSFETs, PMICs, cooling motors and power management products even as weak PC demand limits suppliers' ability to pass on higher costs.

A Chinese research team has developed a phase-change memristor-based neural dynamical system chip, offering a potential hardware path for real-time brain modeling, brain-computer interfaces, and brain disease diagnosis.

South Korean equipment maker Hanmi Semiconductor is moving beyond high-bandwidth memory (HBM) tools into advanced chip packaging, a shift that could affect the global semiconductor supply chain. As ASE boosts capacity to meet TSMC-linked demand, Hanmi is positioning for broader sales growth in the second half of 2026 and beyond.