Samsung Electronics vice chairman Jay Y. Lee received a presidential pardon Friday for his role in a 2016 political scandal, a move the South Korean government says is necessary so the country's largest chaebol can help steady the national economy.

SoftBank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son says he wants to re-list ARM Holdings Plc within five years, re-introducing stock markets to the British chipmaker his company bought for $32 billion in 2016.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that AMD's 2016 joint venture known as Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment, or THATIC, allowed a company with ties to the Chinese military to obtain chip technology that could boost China's supercomputer efforts.

"The suggestion that we were somehow victim of a national conspiracy is wrong. The facts of the matter are that we were robbed by a handful of our own employees based in Silicon Valley, who had broken the law to enrich themselves. All of this occurred several years ago. We found this out by ourselves and immediately sought legal action in public court in 2016. This was reported on in several publications after our victory in November 2018," said ASML president and CEO Peter Wennink.

With 83% of Samsung's semiconductor sales being memory devices last year, the memory market downturn is expected to drag the company's total semiconductor sales down by 20% this year. Although Intel's semiconductor sales are forecast to be relatively flat in 2019, the company is poised to regain the number 1 semiconductor supplier ranking this year, a position it held from 1993 through 2016.

One case involved a Taiwanese unit of Idaho-based Micron Technology. On a spring day in 2016, a 41-year-old engineer for the unit opened his company laptop and, according to Taiwanese prosecutors, tapped into Google search: "clear computer use records."

Nvidia's big push into the world of autonomous vehicles has attracted a vast amount of customers for what is still early stage technology - over 320, by the company's count. This week at CES the company announced that it's finally making Xavier, an AI chip made for self-driving vehicles that Nvidia announced in 2016, available to customers. And the company's also adding a few marquee names to its list of self-driving technology customers, including Uber and VW.

In 2016, NXP in the Netherlands overtook Renesas Electronics in Japan as the world's largest microcontroller supplier with MCU revenues climbing 116% following its US$11.6 billion purchase of US-based Freescale Semiconductor in December 2015.

The Mali-C71 is the first development to come out of ARM's 2016 acquisition of Apical, which gave ARM the capabilities in imaging and computer vision necessary to meet the automotive market's needs.

Apple finally broke 60% share threshold in Japan smartphone market during Q4 2016, posting yet another record market share in this country, mostly driven by the robust sales of the new flagships iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus.

For the coming year, Intel said that revenues would be flat on 2016, in part due to the sale of its security business, but with earnings returning to growth, up from $2.12 a share last year to $2.53 in 2017.

China's economy grew by 6.7% in 2016, compared with 6.9% a year earlier, according to official data, marking its slowest growth since 1990.

The increased consumer interest in smartphones, according to Accenture, is based largely on the Chinese market. Nearly three out of four Chinese consumers said they would buy new smartphones in 2017, up from 61% in 2016.

More than 177,000 people attended CES last year, making CES 2016 a record-breaking year.

HTC is having trouble getting AMOLED headset display panels as competition grows, industry analysts say. Even more glaringly real, newer brands would cut into VIVE's lead anyway.

Things are looking good for Intel through the end of 2016, according to BlueFin Research Partners's Steve Mullane, after reviewing what he deems production levels last month at the company's factories.

The value of initial public offerings globally has fallen by about a third this year compared to the same period in 2015, illustrating the difficulties new listings have faced during a period of market volatility and political uncertainty.

Tech giant Samsung Electronics is gearing up to fully operate a production line for 3D NAND flash memory at its plant in Hwaseong City, Gyeonggi Province. Considering the one-month period to build the equipment and tools, it is expected that the facility will likely be in full operation around the end of 2016.

Samsung Electronics is slated to hold a foundry forum in China later this month (August 2016) to attract Chinese fabless firms amid its growing idle foundry lines, industry experts said on Tuesday.

Five of Samsung Group subsidiaries have slashed about 5,700 jobs so far in 2016 via voluntary retirement programs, according to the units' regulatory filings on Thursday.

According to new reports, Samsung's monthly Note 7 shipments could eclipse those of the Note 5, coming in at as many as 3 million phones per month during the third quarter of 2016.

Korean newspaper Chosun Biz reported that Samsung had picked up a contract from Nvidia to manufacture Pascal GPUs. The manufacturing is set to begin before the end of 2016, and will use Samsung's patented 14-nanometer technology.

South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics said on Thursday it expects solid earnings to continue in the second half of 2016, with stronger components demand likely offsetting heightened margin pressures for smartphones.

Toshiba is planning to start the manufacturing of the world's first 64-layer 3D NAND flash memory chips in the third quarter of 2016 with Samsung Electronics being expected to release the same type of products in the following quarter.

Chinese companies are still seeking US public listings despite a rush of delistings in the past year or so, said Nasdaq CEO Robert Greifeld on Friday.

Apple will likely take three years between full-model changes of its iPhone devices, a year longer than the current cycle. In a typical two-year term, fall 2016 was supposed to see a major upgrade. But the changes on the model to be launched this autumn will be minor, such as improved camera quality.

Taiwan's tech suppliers will get significantly fewer orders from Apple in the second half of 2016 compared with a year ago, no thanks to an ongoing slump in demand for premium smartphones and a lack of groundbreaking features for the upcoming iPhone 7, sources familiar with the matter told the Nikkei Asian Review.

Applied Materials said orders hit a 15-year high in its latest quarter, prompting the maker of semiconductor manufacturing tools to project a major rebound in its business later in 2016 as those transactions are completed.

Bosch said revenue rose 44% to an all-time high of EUR70.6 billion ($79.9 billion) last year helped by sales of car safety and assistance systems but cautioned that momentum had slowed at the start of 2016.

Apple's global iPhone shipments will fall short of analysts' consensus estimates of 210 to 230 million units in the 2016 fiscal year, according to a new research note issued by respected KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. In a worst case scenario, iPhone shipments in 2016 are expected to reach just 190 million units, which is an 18% reduction in shipment growth and 3 million fewer iPhones than Apple sold in 2014.

Samsung will have the thinner, 10-nanometer chipmaking technology in production later in 2016. Samsung also announced plans for a new cost-optimized 14-nanometer process as well as a second generation of 10-nanometer technology that it says will offer 10% better performance than the first generation.

Apple A-series chip supplier Samsung this week announced plans to put a next-generation 10-nanometer chip fabrication process into production later in 2016, with the new technology supposedly affording a 10% increase in efficiency over existing iterations.

The outlook for PC shipments continues to call for eventual stabilization as competition from other devices eases, upgrades to new models and Windows 10 boost demand, and economic conditions around the world stabilize or improve. However, the decline in PC volume since early 2012 is still expected to linger through 2016 with later years struggling to boost volumes as economic issues and competing products continue to present headwinds, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker.

The transaction is expected to be completed during the second quarter of 2016.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg says a new computing platform comes around every 10 years. This year, he says, the next one arrives: virtual reality. Zuckerberg is trying to will that prediction into reality with Oculus VR, a Facebook subsidiary that in March begins shipping its $600 virtual-reality headsets, dubbed the Rift.

Chinese trade started 2016 on a weak note as January exports declined far more than expected in the face of weak demand and slower production ahead of the just-ended Lunar New Year holiday.

Micron announced that it is shipping 2 bit per cell flash memory (MLC) and three bit per cell (TLC) 3D flash memory and that the majority of its total NAND flash output will be on 3D NAND by the second half of 2016.