The US-China trade war has put Huawei, and in general the smartphone market, in limbo. Huawei has sharply cut orders for flagship smartphones, according to supply chain information available to Digitimes Research. The woeful smartphone...

US-headquartered companies held 52% of the total worldwide IC market in 2018, followed by their fellow South Korea-based companies with a 27% share, according to IC Insights.

China ICT makers are keen on turning to Taiwan supply chain as they seek alternative import sources of discrete power semiconductor devices, especially medium- and high-end ones long dominated by US and Europe IDMs, to counter uncertainties of the US-China tariff war and trade sanctions on Huawei.

The order visibility for Taiwan-based IC design houses for the third quarter of 2019 is unclear with prospects of seeing demand from the handset sector further soften later on, as the US-China trade row continues, and global macroeconomics begins to take the hit, according to industry sources.

Sensor component specialist Sensortek Technology, in which Sitronix Technology holds a 50.44% stake, started trading on Taiwan's emerging stock market on June 18.

TSMC will soon enter volume shipments for new Xilinx adaptive compute acceleration processors manufactured using 7nm process technology, according to industry sources.

Renesas Electronics has announced it has developed an AI accelerator that performs CNN (convolutional neural network) processing at high speeds and low power to move towards the next generation of Renesas embedded AI (e-AI), which will accelerate increased intelligence of endpoint devices.

Nvidia has announced its support for Arm CPUs. Nvidia is making available to the Arm ecosystem its full stack of AI and HPC software - which accelerates more than 600 HPC applications and all AI frameworks - by year's end. The stack includes all Nvidia Cuda-X AI and HPC libraries, GPU-accelerated AI...

Mobile SoC specialist MediaTek expects its sales for the second quarter of 2019 to come within the guidance given previously of 13-21% sequential growth.

The US ban on Huawei does not seem to have dampened the industry players' interests in 5G, with many still expecting explosive growths to come soon. Handset vendors remain as keen as ever on rolling out 5G smartphones sooner rather than...

Taiwan's ASMedia Technology is expected to complete tape-outs for PCIe 4.0 interface chip solutions by the end of 2019, seeking to strive for more contract design orders from AMD in 2020, when the US chipmaker's chipsets enter the PCIe 4.0 era, according to industry sources.

X-Fab Silicon Foundries, an analog/mixed-signal and specialty foundry, and crowd-sourcing IC platform partner Efabless, has announced the silicon availability of the Efabless RISC-V system on chip (SoC) reference design. This open-source semiconductor project went from design start to tape-out in less...

Taiwan-based IC design houses have seen brand handset vendors slow down their pace of orders for 4G models, but start ramping up demand for new-generation 5G devices, according to industry sources.

Broadcom has announced sampling of its StrataXGS Trident 4 BCM56880 switch series, deliveringwhat it calls the industry's highest Ethernet switching performance combined with compiler-programmable packet processing and telemetry. Offering bandwidths of 2.0 to 12.8 terabits per second (Tb/s), the Trident...

Global fab equipment spending will rebound in 2020, growing 20% to US$58.4 billion after dropping 19% to US$48.4 billion in 2019, according to SEMI.

Qualcomm has begun implementing its commitment to expanding investments in Taiwan, enhancing its collaboration with local companies and academic organizations after reaching a settlement over an anti-trust lawsuit with Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission (FTC), according to deputy science and technology...

With Huawei already stocking up on crucial components, the US Commerce Department's ban will not stop Huawei from providing its products and services in the short term. However, the ban has spooked consumers, enterprises and telecom operators, shaking their confidence in Huawei's ability to continue...

HiSilicon, Huawei's chip design subsidiary, will likely fail to beat MediaTek and become the largest Asia-based fabless chipmaker in 2019 as its shipment growth will be affected negatively by the US trade restrictions on its parent company.

IC design houses Novatek Microelectronics and Realtek Semiconductor both saw their May revenues climb to respective record-high levels, thanks to shipments of their new products.

A new supply chain for China IT firms may gradually take shape in Asia in the future as they are seeking to wean themselves off US suppliers of crucial components and facilitate their 5G deployments amid US trade sanctions against Huawei and other Chinese tech players, according to industry sources.

Mobile SoC specialist MediaTek saw its May revenues fall below NT$20 billion (US$636.8 million).

Taiwan IC designers have turned conservative about their revenue performances for the second half of 2019 as uncertain fallouts of the US-China trade war and trade sanctions against Huawei are expected to significantly dampen terminal market sales of handsets, PCs, servers and TVs, according to industry...

The supply of rigid OLED handset panels is getting tight recently, as more handset brands are using this type of panels paired with in-display fingerprint sensors for their premium models, according to industry sources.

Server management SoC solution provider Aspeed Technology has started delivering in small volume samples of its new baseboard management controller (BMC) chips for servers based on Intel's next-generation Whitley server platform in June, with large-scale sample delivering scheduled to kick off in the...

Winbond Electronics and Macronix International have reported sequential increases in May consolidated revenues of 2.8% and 30.6%, respectively.