The main trading partners of the US have reacted angrily after President Donald Trump announced plans to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium imports. Canada and the EU, both key US allies, said they would bring forward countermeasures. Mexico, China and Brazil have also said they are weighing up retaliatory steps.

Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018 has seen dozens of 5G-related announcements, spanning devices, modems, radios, plans, spectrum, and trials.

Intel intends to expand its partnership with Beijing-backed Tsinghua Unigroup by providing NAND flash memory chips as soon as this year, according to industry sources.

Qualcomm has introduced the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 700 Mobile Platform Series, designed to exceed what is expected from today's high-tier mobile experiences, with features and performance previously only available in the premium Snapdragon 800 Mobile Platform Series. Advances to be expected in the 700 Series include on-device AI supported by the Qualcomm Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engine, and improvements to camera, device performance and power.

Qualcomm has dropped its objections to being acquired by Singapore's Broadcom and is willing to agree a deal with its rival chipmaker if it raises its takeover offer to $160bn including debt, according to people involved in the negotiations.

STMicroelectronics and Macom Technology Solutions announced an agreement that will improve Macom's access to manufacturing capacity for its gallium nitride-on-silicon technology and enable ST to manufacture its own products based on the technology for the RF energy and RF lighting markets.

Microchip maker Broadcom has cut its bid for Qualcomm by 4% to $117 billion as it objected to Qualcomm's decision to raise its own bid for NXP Semiconductors to $44 billion.

Google is working on an overhaul of its Android mobile software for a new generation of smartphones mimicking Apple's controversial new "notch" at the top of the iPhone X, according to people familiar with the situation.

Samsung Electronics will break ground for a new foundry in Hwaseong, south of Seoul, on Friday with an aim to start mass-producing below-7 nanometer chips in the second half next year and make headway in the race for customized computer chips to power smart and robotics devices.

Intel plans to invest $5 billion to expand production at its Kiryat Gat plant in southern Israel, Israeli Economy Minister Eli Cohen said on Wednesday after talks with the US chipmaker.

Intel claimed that it maintained Moore's law scaling with a 10-nm SRAM that it described here at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). However, Samsung followed by describing a smaller 256-Mbit SRAM made with extreme ultraviolet lithography and expressed confidence in EUV.

Tsinghua Unigroup has signed an agreement with the government of the Chinese city of Chongqing and Sino IC Capital to set up an integrated circuit (IC) investment firm, which will invest up to $100 billion in the Chinese state chipmaker's IC sites over the next decade.

Injong Rhee, a former chief technology officer at Samsung Electronics, has joined Google as an entrepreneur-in-residence to lead Google's Internet of Things (IoT) business, Rhee said in a blog posting on LinkedIn.

Qualcomm and Broadcom plan to meet on Wednesday to talk about the latter's $121 billion acquisition offer, the first time the semiconductor companies will discuss the potential deal, people familiar with the matter said.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X50 5G NR modem family has been selected by a number of global original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for standard-compliant 5G NR mobile device product launches starting in 2019. Those working with Qualcomm include OEMs such as Asus, Fujitsu Limited, Fujitsu Connected Technologies Limited, HMD Global, HTC, Inseego/Novatel Wireless, LG, NetComm Wireless, NETGEAR, OPPO, Sharp, Sierra Wireless, Sony Mobile, Telit, vivo, Wingtech, WNC, Xiaomi and ZTE.

Shares in Lumentum Holdings soared 23% on Tuesday after the optical components maker said it shipped more than $200 million worth of 3D sensing lasers to a customer that two analysts identified as Apple Inc.

Samsung Electronics has decided to cooperate with the Chinese government to develop next-generation technologies including artificial intelligence (AI). With China having been putting pressure on Samsung Electronics due to a rise in the price of memory chips supplied to Chinese smartphone makers, some market watchers say that the partnership can settle a series of conflicts between the two.

Broadcom raised its bid for Qualcomm to about $121 billion, seeking to force the rival chipmaker to the negotiating table after Qualcomm rejected an earlier offer as too low.

Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong has been freed from jail after a South Korean court suspended his five year jail term for bribing the country's ex-president. Seoul High Court upheld parts of the conviction, but used its discretion to release the executive.

Ampere, a new chip company run by former Intel president Renee James, came out of stealth today with a brand-new highly efficient Arm-based server chip targeted at hyperscale data centers.

Samsung Electronics is launching a new chip for cars, tentatively called Exynos Auto, with aims to supply the chip first to Audi that has used chips mostly from Qualcomm, industry sources said on Feb. 5.

Broadcom plans to unveil a new approximately $120 billion offer for Qualcomm on Monday, aiming to ratchet up pressure on its US semiconductor peer to engage in negotiations, people familiar with the matter said on Sunday.

Samsung Electronics is expected to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), a macroeconomic management agency under China's State Council, this week.

For several years, Apple has been steadily designing more and more of the chips powering its iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple Watches.

China will fill 15% of its semiconductor needs in 2020 and perhaps 20% in 2022. That's significant growth, but far from the targets of 40% in 2020 and 70% in 2022 that the China government has set.

The new products enable corporate data centers having data set sizes smaller than found in hyperscale environments to harness the power of data across a broad spectrum of Big Data applications such as analytics and distributed file systems.

Japanese chip vendor Renesas Electronics denied that it is in talks to acquire rival Maxim Integrated after reports about a possible deal sent Maxim's stock price skyrocketing.

A plan for a billion-dollar fab in Guangzhou, China, aims to pool investments from fabless companies, creating a built-in customer base. It is the latest addition to a growing list of projects as the country tries to build up its semiconductor sector.

Western Digital gave strong profit forecasts for the current quarter and the full year on Thursday and said the flash memory market would grow faster this year, easing investor jitters that the surging demand for memory chips was fading.

Texas Instruments on Tuesday posted the slowest revenue growth in four quarters on softer demand for its chips used in communications equipment, disappointing investors who expected sales for automotive chips to drive strong results.

Micro semi, the largest US commercial supplier of military and aerospace semiconductor equipment, is exploring its options, including a possible sale, after it received a takeover approach, a person familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

Rumors have started popping up online suggesting that Meizu will no longer release MediaTek-powered smartphones, as the company is focusing more on Exynos and Snapdragon-powered gadgets.

The European Commision (EC), the EU's legislative and regulatory arm, said its investigation, which lasted for more than two years, concluded that Qualcomm paid Apple billions of dollars to keep it from buying LTE baseband chips from Qualcomm's rivals, violating EU antitrust rules.

In 2017, about two dozen acquisition agreements were reached for semiconductor companies, business units, product lines, and related assets with a combined value of $27.7 billion compared to the record-high $107.3 billion set in 2015 and the $99.8 billion total in 2016.

Nearly three years after Tokyo Electron's planned merger with Applied Materials collapsed over objections from US anti-trust regulators, the Japanese company finds itself in a surprising position: healthier profit margins.

Micron has announced with Rambus, Northwest Logic and Avery Design, their efforts to deliver a comprehensive solution for GDDR6, the world's fastest discrete memory. This first-of-its-kind solution would enable GDDR6 use in advanced applications such as high-performance networking, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and 5G infrastructure.

After Imagination Technologies bought MIPS Technologies in 2013, they invested in the architecture and attempted to build a business around it as a potential ARM competitor. These plans largely failed, and Imagination Technologies arranged the sale of MIPS - and itself - to different venture capital firms in the fall of 2017. Now, the company has been brought back to Silicon Valley, where it hopes to build a new line of competitive processors for AI workloads.

The industry this year may see a microprocessor ship from startup Graphcore that uses no DRAM and one from rival Cerebras Systems that pioneers wafer-level integration. The hefty 2.5-D Nervana chip acquired by Intel is already sampling, and a dozen other processors are in the works. Meanwhile, chip companies from ARM to Western Digital are working on cores to accelerate the inference part of deep neural nets.

The South Korean chip industry is tightening its monitoring of increasing protectionist moves by China and the US as they are faced with probes and suspicions of price collision.