Toshiba's chief executive resigned on Wednesday amid controversy over a $20bn buyout bid from private equity firm, CVC Capital Partners.

US President Joe Biden met with executives from major companies on Monday to discuss the global chip shortage that has hit automakers and spurred Intel to announce it plans to make chips for car plants at its factories in the next six to nine months.

Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei Technologies is making business resilience its top priority with a push to develop its software capabilities as it seeks to overcome US restrictions that have devastated its smartphone business.

Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment has started preparations for a US initial public offering of chipmaker Globalfoundries, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Broadband providers are seeing delays of more than a year when ordering internet routers, becoming yet another victim of chip shortages choking global supply chains and adding challenges for millions still working from home.

Tighter US sanctions against China's Huawei Technologies announced in May 2020 shifted the global semiconductor supply chain in a way nobody had expected, with a flood of orders enriching Taiwanese foundries and changing the island's landscape.

General Motors is extending production cuts at some of its North America factories due to a chip shortage that has roiled the global automotive industry, the US carmaker said on Thursday.

The Biden administration on Thursday placed seven Chinese firms and government labs under US export controls for their involvement in China's effort to build supercomputers that help develop nuclear and other advanced military weapons. All seven are linked to China's ambition to build the world's first exascale computer, Commerce Department officials said.

Production of some MacBooks and iPads has been postponed due to the global component shortage, Nikkei Asia has learned, in a sign that even Apple, with its massive procurement power, is not immune from the unprecedented supply crunch.

Tianshu Zhixin said in January that BI was made using an unidentified 7nm process node and 2.5D chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging. On Wednesday, it confirmed our suspicion that BI was made using TSMC's 7nm FinFET process.

Samsung Electronics likely saw a 45% jump in profit for January-March on robust sales of smartphones, TVs and home appliances, though chip division earnings are seen tumbling after a storm suspended production at its US plant.

Micron Technology on Wednesday forecast fiscal third-quarter revenue above Wall Street estimates due to a rise in demand for memory chips thanks to 5G smartphones and artificial intelligence software that is pushing memory chip prices upward.

"I have never seen anything like this in the past 20 years since our company's founding," said Jordan Wu, co-founder and chief executive officer of Himax Technologies, a leading supplier of display drivers. "Every application is short of chips."

Subaru will reduce vehicle production by about 10,000 autos at a Japanese assembly plant as the industry struggles with a shortage of chips.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger will virtually attend a meeting being put together by President Joe Biden's administration for April 12 to discuss the semiconductor supply chain issues disrupting US automotive factories, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Micron Technology and Western Digital are each exploring a potential deal for Kioxia Holdings that could value the Japanese semiconductor company at around US$30 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

The global shortage of semiconductors and winter storm that devastated Texas last month probably cost carmakers production of about 1.3 million vehicles this quarter, according to IHS Markit.

Arm has unveiled the biggest overhaul of its technology in almost a decade, with new designs targeting markets currently dominated by Intel.

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.