AMD and MediaTek are said to be seeking to form a joint venture that will develop notebook applications integrating Wi-Fi, 5G and high-transmission technologies. Other chip vendors in Taiwan are also hoping MediaTek to play a leading role in the local supply chain to compete with Qualcomm in the mmWave 5G market. In the EV market, Thailand has ambitious goals for its car manufacturing sector.

NAND flash pices may stablize in 2022, but supply is likely to turn tight in the second half of next year, according to Silicon Motion's president. Meanwhile, Chinese memory maker YMTC is ready to volume produce 128-layer QLC NAND flash, initially targeting consumer SSDs. And in a recent interview by DIGITIMES, Harish Krishnaswamy, CTO and co-founder of MixComm, and Marzieh Veyseh, CTO/CPO and co-founder of SiTune, talked about their views on the development of mmWave market, latest chip crunch, and the Satcom market opportunities.

Suppliers said demand from Chinese handset vendors is getting opaque in September, portending possible deferral of peak demand and possible decline in suppliers' revenue for the second half of 2021.

For the sixth straight quarter, the global smartphone applications processor (AP) market clocked a double-digit on-year revenue increase in the second quarter of 2021, according to Strategy Analytics.

While Vietnam is slowly reopening from lockdown, foregin companies find themselves in need of new suppliers, and local workers are unwilling to return to work posts in the city just yet.

Since the 1970s, Taiwan and South Korea have been parallelly developing semiconductor and new-geneation IT industries. The national conditions and industrial strength of the two countries are very similar. During the Cold War, Taiwan and South Korea were part of the first island chain facing the communist world. Now the US and China are rivals that compete head to head with not only weaponry, but also the strength of the technology industry, the most representative of which is the semiconductor industry and the ubiquitous supply chain. About 60% of Taiwan's and Korea's semiconductor exports go to China. In 2020, China imported as much as US$350 billion of semiconductors, with about half of them from Taiwan and South Korea. Taiwan and South Korea both export enormously to China on the one hand, and vie for the industry leadership position on the other. South Korea specializes in memory, but Taiwan's industry structure is more diverse: wafer foundry, IC design, packaging and testing. Taiwan and South Korea dislike each other but also rely on each other.

Fabless chipmakers are looking to step up their deployments in the 5G RF front-end module (RF FEM) and other device markets by working closely with their manufacturing partners, according to industry sources.

Taiwan-based chipmaker MediaTek announced its plans to recruit more innovation staff in India to support local manufacturing, according to PTI, although the actual number of new employees they are looking for is not disclosed.

Flexible AMOLED + On Cell display design is adopted for 5.4-inch iPhone 13 mini, 6.1-inch iPhone 13, 6.1-inch iPhone 13 Pro and 6.7-inch iPhone 13 Pro Max, according to industry sources.

With the new-generation iPhones equipped with more antenna-in-package (AiP) modules, AiP packaging demand will be rising along with the iPhone sales, according to industry sources.

Taiwan's suppliers of high-speed transmission chips, which have obtained commitments from foundries to provide sufficient capacity support next year, are gearing up for a boom in their output value, according to industry sources.