King Yuan Electronics (KYEC) has been requested by Huawei's semiconductor subsidiary HiSilicon to provide 20-30% more of the testing house's available production capacity in the first quarter of 2019, according to industry sources.

The next generation of mobile connectivity, 5G, is moving out of its testing stage and will take off in 2019, according to MediaTek chairman MK Tsai.

Chip demand for emerging AI and 5G applications will keep surging to become a major growth driver for the global semiconductor sector in the next three years, according to Terry Tsao, president of SEMI Taiwan and the organization's newly-appointed chief marketing officer (CMO).

Taiwan's production value of LCD driver ICs is expected to grow 17% on year in the fourth quarter of 2018 driven by rising unit shipments and prices propelled by growing demand for large-size panels and high resolution displays from the smartphone sector, as well as tight capacity at foundry houses...

China's vendors are likely to adopt a pricing strategy selling their 5G smartphones at about CNY500 (US$74) more than their current price ranges to increase profitability in 2019, according to sources from Taiwan's handset supply chain.

The historic flood of merger and acquisition agreements that swept through the semiconductor industry in 2015 and 2016 slowed significantly in 2017 and then eased back further in 2018, but the total value of M&A deals reached in the last year was still nearly more than twice the annual average...

Mobile SoC specialist MediaTek is pursuing new business growth from non-handset markets, and has been enhancing its custom ASIC offering and customer portfolio in the sector, according to sources familiar with the matter.

As TSMC will surely take time digesting its iPhone AP inventory amid lingering lackluster sales of Apple's smartphones, most Taiwan IC designers are worried their gross margins in 2019 will be undermined significantly as price competitions are expected to heat up among peers amid loosened foundry capacity...

More mobile SoC suppliers are expected to start sampling their 5G-capable solutions at the end of 2019, which will spur further demand for 7nm fabrication processes at foundries, according to Digitimes Research.

As international IDMs still dominate the market for IGBT, the core power component for new energy vehicles and hybrid vehicles, Taiwan makers of discrete power devices are keen to enhance their deployments in other automotive semiconductor devices including rectifier diode and MOSFETs or in developing...

With prices for handset-use fingerprint sensors continuing their downward trend due to intensifying competition among China- and Taiwan-based suppliers, Taiwan-based fingerprint sensor specialists have moved to diversify their target markets to include notebooks, bank debit cards and other non-handset...

Taiwan's prosecutors have launched an investigation into four former Novatek Microelectronics employees over allegations of trade secret theft.

Last year at CES, Nvidia's touted much about artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous driving. But at a CES 2019 pre-show, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang's focus clearly switched back to its latest PC GPUs, indicating that the GPU giant may have seen rising competition in the graphics card market, and...

The world's leading semiconductor suppliers significantly increased their combined market share over the past decade. According to IC Insights, the top-5 semiconductor suppliers accounted for 47% of the world's semiconductor sales in 2018, up 14pp from 10 years earlier.

Taiwan chipmaker MediaTek is gearing up to expand its businesses in AI, automotive electronics and ASIC sectors, internally dubbed as the "3A" plan, seeking to reverse in 2019 its two consecutive years of revenue declines, according to industry sources.

Rising chip demand for data centers, AI and IoT applications will still fail to offset the impact of falling demand for Apple's iPhones and other smartphones on 2019 revenues at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which holds an over 50% share of the world's semiconductor foundry market,...

ILI Technology (Ilitek), a MediaTek subsidiary specializing in LCD driver ICs, is expected to see its TDDI chip shipments pick up at least 50% on year in 2019, which may reshuffle the global TDDI supplier rankings in the year, according to industry sources.

Worldwide semiconductor revenues totaled US$476.7 billion in 2018, a 13.4% increase from 2017, according to preliminary results by Gartner. Memory strengthened its position as the largest semiconductor category, accounting for 34.8% of total semiconductor revenues, up from 31% in 2017.

Semiconductor material distributors Topco Scientific and Wahlee Industrial have both reported on-year increases in consolidated revenues for 2018 of 21.4% and 23.4%, respectively.

IC distributors WPG and WT Microelectronics both saw their December revenues register double-digit sequential decreases, but their revenues for all of 2018 still hit record-high levels.

Himax Technologies has secured several design wins for smartphones and other applications, including one major TDDI (touch and display driver integration) design win from a South Korea-based smartphone vendor, according to the fabless chipmaker.

As millimeter wave (mmWave) is likely to serve as the first frontier technology to mobilize Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) applications in the 5G commercial market from 2019-2020, Qualcomm is actively deploying in the mmWave sector in order to maintain its technology advantage, according to Digitimes...

Qualcomm and MediaTek have both introduced their new 802.11ax chip solutions to support Wi-Fi 6 devices, seeking to secure a preemptive presence in both enterprise and household network chips markets in the 5G era.

AMD has unveiled recently its 7nm CPU and GPU lineup designed for high-performance PCs, gaming and data center applications. The new processor series are all reportedly being fabricated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

MediaTek saw its consolidated revenues grow 14.6% sequentially in December, but revenues for all of 2018 slipped 0.1% on year to NT$238.06 billion (US$7.73 billion).