Micron Technology has settled a high-profile intellectual property theft lawsuit with a key, state-backed Chinese rival amid the US company's efforts to mend ties with Beijing.

South Korea's memory-chip exports increased in October for the first time in 16 months, offering more evidence for the revival of demand for the country's most important products.

Changxin Memory Technologies plans to file for a domestic initial public offering this year that could value the Chinese chipmaker north of $14.5 billion, a milestone debut that could help galvanize the country's technology aspirations.

The White House has asked South Korea to urge its chipmakers not to fill any market gap in China if Beijing bans Idaho-based Micron from selling chips, as it tries to rally allies to counter Chinese economic coercion.

Memory chip maker Micron Technology will shut its DRAM chip designing operations in Shanghai by the end of this year, the company confirmed late on Wednesday.

Micron Technology is planning to build a DRAM plant in Hiroshima prefecture, western Japan, for as much as JPY800 billion (US$6.98 billion), the Nikkan Kogyo newspaper reported Wednesday, without attribution.

South Korean chip maker SK Hynix has admitted some of its DRAM components included defects, though it says accounts of the issue are overblown.

Manish Bhatia, Micron's executive vice president, said that even with "deep pockets" it will take time for Chinese newcomers to make a significant impact on the global memory chip market, but stressed that his company takes all competition seriously and is paying close attention to the progresses of emerging Chinese competitors.

While Micron's solid report card didn't exactly come as a surprise, it was nonetheless a positive end to the fiscal year. There's work to be done to get back to record sales and profits, but 2020 at least brought an end to a year-and-a-half-long memory chip industry slump and a return to growth.

Micron Technology said the outlook for demand is worsening and predicted it's unlikely to meet its revenue forecast for the fiscal first quarter. Shares dropped about 5% on the comments.

DRAM designed in Japan by a team of 100 will help combat US sanctions

The LPDDR5 chips are 30 percent faster and use less power.

A power failure at a Samsung Electronics factory disrupted production of semiconductors on Tuesday, industry sources said.

DRAM is used for main memory in systems, and today's most advanced devices are based on roughly 18nm to 15nm processes. The physical limit for DRAM is somewhere around 10nm. There are efforts in R&D to extend the technology, and ultimately to displace it with new memory types. So far, however, there is no direct replacement.

Micron was allowed to sell and support some of its products to Huawei, but it was forbidden to supply Huawei with new products or sign new sales agreements.

Although slower than DRAM, Baidu says the swap will lower its costs.

While spot markets make up a small percentage of the memory chip market, Ike Cho, a Bernstein analyst, said the South Korean groups are pushing up prices as they negotiate contracts for the third quarter with their customers.

SK Hynix said it expected demand for DRAM chips to recover later this year, with new smartphones adopting high-density chips.

Here's why that matters: Samsung wants to prepare for "an accelerated global IT transition to next-generation DRAM interfaces, such as DDR5, LPDDR5 and GDDR6."

US sanctions against Fujian Jinhua will force the Chinese state-owned company accused of stealing trade secrets from American memory chipmaker Micron to stop production by March, according to people familiar with the situation.

Taiwan's United Microelectronics will move nearly half of its DRAM team to new positions within the company in what sources say is the first step toward terminating its memory chip development business.

Korea isn't standing still and allowing China to just catch up and take the lead. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have come up with a series of new products that they hope will widen the technological gap with their Chinese counterparts.

For a sense of the damage Donald Trump can inflict on China with export controls, take a trip to the city of Jinjiang on the country's southeastern coast. That's where Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co. built a $6 billion plant to produce semiconductors as part of China's goal of making the country a self-sufficient technology powerhouse.

US official fears supply chain attack on US military systems.

Samsung now expects bit growth of less than 20% for DRAM and a rise of 30% for NAND flash.

Despite Micron's recent stellar earnings results, the stock has been under pressure since late June due to China concerns.

China has launched a probe into Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology, the three semiconductor makers who control the market for DRAM memory chips.

The response came after industry website Jiweinet reported on Friday that the Chinese antitrust agency launched a sudden investigation into the Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen offices of Samsung, SK Hynix Inc and Micron Technology on Thursday seeking certain information.

Micron Technology said Chinese regulatory authority representatives visited its offices in that country, potentially opening another front in a growing trade dispute between the world's two largest economies.

Another class action lawsuit has been filed, alleging that Samsung, Hynix, and Micron conspired to limit the supply of memory, keeping consumer prices artificially high as a result.

More analysts raised their price targets on shares following better-than-expected earnings though shares were down 8.2% at last check in Friday trading, their worst one-day percentage decline since late November.

Chinese memory chip manufacturers pose no serious threat yet to established players, Micron Technology CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said, citing high barriers to entry for aspiring global suppliers.

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.

Price increases for both DRAM and NAND flash memory are raising the outlook for the overall semiconductor market.

Samsung Electronics is positively considering rolling out a next-generation DRAM using an early 10 nano process as early as the beginning of 2019 by constructing a dedicated production line with EUV exposure equipment in the Hwasung Semiconductor Factory Complex in Gyeonggi-do. Experts say that this strategy aimed to secure profitability while widening micro-process technology gaps with competitors in the booming DRAM market.

ASML's Holistic Lithography integrates a set of products that enables chip makers to develop, optimize and control the production process at the 7/5 nanometer (nm) logic and 16 nm DRAM nodes.

Micron Technology is expected to report US$1.9 billion for the three months ended in May. That puts the company on track to post more than US$5 billion in operating earnings for its fiscal 2017.

Samsung Electronics is seeking to increase high-performance DRAM chips for AI processors and servers by more than 30-fold and supply the chips first to key clients Intel and Nvidia, multiple industry sources told ET News on May 30.

Micron will install 13-nanometer production equipment at the Hiroshima Prefecture facility.

Samsung Electronics is planning to invest in a new DRAM lab, according to Korean media reports. The move raises concerns of a capital spending race which could ruin profitability for makers of DRAM, a memory chip commonly used in smartphones.