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Wednesday 7 October 2026
Smaller batteries, smarter roads: Honda tests different EV cost model
The complexity of vehicle economics surrounding surging battery costs has long put the EV industry in a difficult position, caught between power-delivery constraints and energy-efficiency demands.
Tuesday 6 October 2026
Chinese LCD panel makers tighten supply to lift prices — Taiwan suppliers eye order shifts
Chinese panel makers moved to cut production during the National Day holiday after issuing their first price increase notices in September, combining pricing signals with supply controls to stabilize LCD TV panel prices and profitability.
Tuesday 6 October 2026
South Korea keeps sovereign AI contest on track, adds KRW4.7T frontier program after hours of confusion
South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT said its Sovereign AI Foundation Model Project will run to completion as originally planned. The statement reversed, within hours, a vice minister's suggestion that the national-team AI competition would wind down as the government launches a new KRW4.7 trillion frontier AI program.
Tuesday 6 October 2026
China's 15th five-year plan elevates PCB role in AI supply chains
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Development and Reform Commission have released the 15th Five-Year Plan for the development of the electronic information manufacturing industry, aiming to push revenue at large-scale enterprises above CNY30 trillion (US$4.5 trillion) by 2030 and foster world-class companies in semiconductors, advanced computing, consumer electronics, basic electronics, and energy electronics.
Tuesday 6 October 2026
Samsung secures customer backing for US$5B substrate expansion
Samsung Electro-Mechanics is investing KRW6.78 trillion (approx. US$5 billion) to expand FCBGA capacity in South Korea and Vietnam. The projects are backed by customer funding and medium- to long-term volume commitments, as demand for high-performance package substrates pushes Korean production lines toward high utilization.
Tuesday 6 October 2026
Huawei's Kirin 9050 Pro reveals new logic folding chip design
Huawei's Kirin 9050 Pro has been fully broken down by Chinese and overseas researchers, giving the market a closer look at the company's "LogicFolding" approach. Analysis from Geekerwan and die-shot images posted by Kurnal Insights show that the flagship SoC in the Huawei Mate 90 Pro Max uses two vertically stacked dies rather than a traditional single-plane chip design.
Tuesday 6 October 2026
Samsung steps up HBM cooling as TSMC expands CoWoS
Samsung Electronics is expanding its thermal-management efforts for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) beyond the memory stack as increasingly large chip packages raise heat-management challenges.
Tuesday 6 October 2026
MIPS deepens RISC-V ties with China despite US-China tech tensions
Despite intense technology competition between the US and China, cooperation between the two sides on the open-standard RISC-V architecture continues to deepen, with US intellectual property provider MIPS expanding its work with Chinese industry.
Tuesday 6 October 2026
LB Semicon expands power chip capacity as Qualcomm production ramps up
South Korean outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) provider LB Semicon is expanding power semiconductor backend capacity at its Gumi plant as it steps up efforts to reduce its reliance on display driver integrated circuits (DDIs) and a highly concentrated customer base, backed by new business from Qualcomm and Renesas and KRW30 billion (approx. US$22.3 million) in planned equipment investment.
Tuesday 6 October 2026
DeepSeek closes in on US rivals despite chip curbs
China's leading AI models have narrowed their performance gap with US rivals to a record low, while DeepSeek's latest advances in memory efficiency and its deepening work with Huawei suggest Chinese developers are finding ways to improve model performance despite tighter access to advanced US chips.
Tuesday 6 October 2026
China's glass substrate ramp-up outpaces South Korea with WG Tech targeting 1M sqm
China's WG Tech has reportedly begun the second phase of investment in its through-glass via (TGV) glass substrate production line, with total future capacity projected to reach 1 million square meters a year. Analysts say Chinese makers have moved ahead of South Korean rivals by building production lines first, then accelerating product output and customer validation, giving China an early lead in glass substrate commercialization.
Monday 5 October 2026
Kyushu's chip expo expands as Japan adds a chip design focus
Japan's Kyushu Semiconductor Industry Exhibition, known as K-Semi, grew 36% at this year's edition in Fukuoka, held from September 30 to October 1, 2026, as chip makers expanded their presence in Kyushu. The event also added a semiconductor design zone for the first time and was held alongside the debut Kyushu Next-Generation Energy Exhibition, or K-Ene.
Monday 5 October 2026
Huawei counters chip-node limits with Ascend, SuperPoD and τ law
Huawei is increasingly framing its semiconductor strategy around a simple constraint: if advanced process nodes remain limited, more performance must come from architecture, interconnect and system-level efficiency.
Monday 5 October 2026
China's ASML DUV stockpile spurs calls to close export-control loophole
Chinese semiconductor manufacturers have stockpiled hundreds of immersion deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography systems worth billions of dollars in recent years, prompting a Washington think tank to call for tighter export controls on equipment that could still support advanced chip production.
Monday 5 October 2026
Commentary: China's US$37.3B subsidy meets a weak smartphone market as new flagships test replacement demand
China's National Day holidays have opened one of the fourth quarter's most important promotional windows for consumer electronics. For smartphones, the timing is especially significant: Apple, Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo and Honor have all launched new models since September, while Huawei introduced its Mate 90 series on October 1.