With chipmaker Renesas Electronics not expected to achieve a full recovery from its recent factory fire until mid-July, Japan's largest automakers have begun bracing for long-term disruptions and potential production cuts.

South Korea's Hyundai Motor Co said on Tuesday it plans to temporarily suspend production at its Ulsan No.1 plant in South Korea due to chip and component supply issues from April 7-14.

South Korea said Monday it has granted the final approval to SK Hynix' KRW120 trillion (US$106 billion) project to build a new semiconductor complex, a move that could ease supply shortages in the global market.

Top US chipmaking equipment supplier Applied Materials said Monday it has abandoned a $3.5 billion deal to acquire Japanese peer Kokusai Electric from investment firm KKR owing to regulatory hurdles.

Samsung Electronics said on Tuesday that production at its US chip plant at Austin, Texas had returned to near-normal levels as of last week after more than a month of disruption that exacerbated a global chip capacity crunch.

Renesas CEO Hidetoshi Shibata told a news conference that while production at the company's fire-hit plant looked likely to resume within a month, recovery to pre-fire levels was expected to take around 100 to 120 days from the incident.

Governments around the world are subsidizing the construction of semiconductor factories as a chip shortage hobbles the auto and electronics industries and highlights the world's singular dependence on Taiwan for vital supplies.

Nio will temporarily halt production at one of its factories in Anhui province because of a semiconductor shortage, becoming the first high-profile Chinese carmaker to succumb to the chip snarl that's silenced the factory lines of auto manufacturers globally.

Japan has called on equipment makers to help one of its biggest chipmakers restore production, the latest government move aimed at easing a semiconductor shortage that has hit production at car companies and is now pressuring makers of electronic devices.

Intel and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have announced a three-year partnership to advance the development of domestically manufactured structured ASIC platforms.

Swedish truckmaker Volvo said on Monday that a shortage of semiconductors would have a substantial impact on production in the second quarter.

A fire at one of Renesas Electronics' semiconductor facilities will probably have a big impact on the supply of chips for the automobile industry, Chief Executive Officer Hidetoshi Shibata said during an online news conference Sunday.

In an update, Infineon said it was continuing to ramp production and expected to reach pre-shutdown levels of production by June.

International bondholders owed tens of millions of dollars by a Beijing-backed semiconductor group are seeking to freeze its overseas assets, as corporate debt problems complicate President Xi Jinping's attempts to unshackle China from foreign-made chips.

Qualcomm chief executive officer Steve Mollenkopf said he expects the global chip shortage to ease for certain products using mature technology.

Japan's Renesas Electronics halted production at one of its main plants in Hitachinaka, northeast of Tokyo, after a fire broke out, the chipmaker said late Friday.

Average delivery times of Kulicke and Soffa Industries' packaging equipment, which require microcontrollers, have doubled to six months, said executive VP Chan Pin Chong. The company supplies equipment to customers like ASE Technology, the world's largest chip packaging and testing services provider.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) said on Wednesday it planned to jointly invest in a US$2.35 billion project with the government of Shenzhen to make 40,000 wafers per month in the southern Chinese city from 2022.

Legend, the parent of the world's biggest PC maker Lenovo, said it purchased about 12.8 million shares of Chinese chipmaker Fullhan Microelectronics for CNY1.54 billion (US$236.9 million).

Qualcomm is struggling to keep up with demand for its processor chips used in smartphones and gadgets, as a chip shortage that first hit the auto industry spreads across the electronics business, industry sources told Reuters.

MIPS Technologies no longer designs MIPS processors. Instead, it's joined the RISC-V camp, abandoning its eponymous architecture for one that has strong historical and technical ties. The move apparently heralds the end of the road for MIPS as a CPU family, and a further (slight) diminution in the variety of processors available. It's the final arc of an architecture.

Steam has published its Hardware & Software Survey for February and AMD has managed to gain further processor usage share from Intel. However, while things look rosy for AMD at the moment, the supply situation could give the upcoming Intel Rocket Lake series an upper hand over the Ryzen 5000 range.

Samsung Foundry will be the first maker of semiconductors to start using gate-all-around field-effect transistor (GAAFET)-like structures with its upcoming 3 nm fabrication process. The node is not quite ready for primetime yet, but at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) engineers from Samsung Foundry shared some of the details about the upcoming 3 nm GAE MBCFET (multi-bridge channel FET) manufacturing technology.

Renesas Electronics' top executive warned that a global shortage of auto semiconductors may persist into the second half, joining other industry leaders in bracing for a chip crunch to snarl production of cars and gadgets well past the summer.

Shares of Marvell Technology Group fell on Wednesday as the designer of 5G networking chips said supplies could remain tight through its fiscal 2022.

Apple's custom-designed 5G cellular modem will likely debut in all 2023 iPhone models, according to Barclays analysts Blayne Curtis and Thomas O'Malley. In a supplier-focused research note shared with MacRumors, the analysts said chipmakers Qorvo and Broadcom should be among the companies that benefit from the shift to Apple's in-house solution.

The working group will meet twice a year to discuss issues such as intellectual property, trade policy and encryption.

An investigation into illegal talent poaching by Beijing-based Bitmain Technologies has revived fears Chinese companies will target Taiwan's top engineers as their country works to build a world-class chipmaking industry.

Apple said it's planning to build a new semiconductor design center in Munich as part of a 1 billion-euro ($1.2 billion) investment push to develop custom chips for 5G mobile and other wireless technologies in Germany.

This rumored chipset, however, might also have other implications beyond cheaper phones. One comment theorized that Huawei might be able to buy this Snapdragon 888, provided it gets an exception.

The European Union wants to produce a fifth of the global output of cutting-edge semiconductors at the end of this decade and make its first quantum computer in five years, as part of efforts to cut its dependence on non-European technologies.

Apple will manufacture Made-In-India iPhone 12 soon, its latest model launched in India on October 30 last year, a few weeks after the global release. iPhone 12, according to sources in the know, will be manufactured at the Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn) facility in Tamil Nadu - both for the domestic as well as well as the export market.

Luokung Technology, a provider of map software and cloud services, faces removal from the Nasdaq Stock Market from March 15 while another four companies, including phone maker Xiaomi, which trade over the counter in New York have also been blacklisted.

China's leaders are finalizing their political and economic agenda for the rest of 2021 and beyond. How the country achieves technological independence and tackles the climate crisis will be near the top.

President Joe Biden's nominee for Commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, said she knows of "no reason" why Huawei Technologies and other Chinese companies shouldn't remain on a restricted trade list.

The European Union is planning to produce its own advanced semiconductors by 2030, part of the bloc's plans to reduce "high-risk dependencies" on technology companies in the US and Asia.

Broadcom shares fell after the company's main chip division reported revenue that just missed Wall Street estimates.

Shares of Marvell Technology fell on Wednesday as the designer of 5G networking chips said supplies could remain tight through its fiscal 2022.

The US Senate is considering including in a new bill to boost competitiveness against China $30 billion in funding for previously-approved measures to supercharge the country's chipmaking industry, a congressional source said on Thursday.

Samsung, NXP Semiconductors and Infineon Technologies were ordered to shut factories in Texas last month after a winter storm killed at least 21 people and left millions of Texans without power.