Tesla had sold 233,856 electric vehicles (EVs) and deployed 948 Supercharger stations with 6,426 charging piles in total around the world as of September 2017, and as the company is expected to sell 800,000 EVs cumulatively by the end of 2018, it has to expand Supercharger stations with 25,000 charging piles in total in 2018.The ratio of the number of cumulatively sold EVs to the total number of charging piles at Supercharger stations fell from 62.3 in 2013 to 36.4 in September 2017 and will further drop to 32 by the end of 2018 if Tesla realizes the expansion, Digitimes Research estimates.While charging piles at Superchargers have power output of 145kW to enable 20-minute charging for running 250km, Superchargers need connection to power grids of high voltage and amperage and enough ground space for EVs to stay for charging. As an alternative, Tesla has deployed destination chargers each with power output of 20kW at commercial facilities such as hotels, restaurants and shopping centers. Cost for installing a set of destination chargers at a location is much lower than that for setting up a Supercharger and they complement each other. As of June 2017, Tesla had installed 5,886 sets of destination chargers around the world.In addition to Superchargers and destination chargers, Tesla has offered a battery swap program to allow EV owners/drivers to exchange batteries at swap stations, with the entire process fully automated. Battery swap takes much less time than charging at Superchargers but costs much higher. Tesla is also developing wireless charging through cooperation with a technology development company. However, there have not yet been common international hardware specifications for battery and wireless charging and therefore there is not significant demand for battery swap and wireless charging for the time being.

The South Korea government has set an ambitious goal to grab a larger pie of the global 5G market as it calculates that its 5G hardware and software market is expected to grow at a CAGR of only 75.6% during the period from 2020-2026 against a much faster pace of 148% projected for the global 5G market for the forecast period, according to Digitimes Research.Aiming to become one of the members of the leading group of the global 5G industry, Korea's telecom operators will begin to try out its 5G networks in 2018 and push the 5G networks into commercial operations in 2020 before integrating its 5G services with other applications such as AR/VR, AI, autonomous driving, smart city, disaster relief and healthcare in 2022.Korea's telecom operators, led by Korea Telecom (KT), have already implemented 5G demonstration networks at the main venues of Pyeongchang Winter Olympics to begin its 5G trial operations.The Korea government also plans to raise R&D ratios for related 5G developments, to pursue hyperlinks and low latency for its 5G networks during the forecast period; it aims to reach a 5G maximum transmission speed of 20Gbps, a latency of one millisecond and a maximum of one million connected devices per square kilometer of the networks.

The growing popularity of all-screen smartphones is playing a role in easing global oversupply of handset displays, as the production of 18:9 panels will consume 12.5-20% more production capacity than that for 16:9 ones, according to Digitimes Research.Recent capacity ramps for handset panels by a number of panel makers from their 6G lines and the gradually saturating smartphone market in China has raised concerns about oversupply of small- to medium-sized LCD panels.All major flat panel makers in China have stepped into the production of 18:9 panels with the bulk of their output being consumed by smartphone vendors in the Greater China area. Notably, Global HMD also plans to launch all-screen models, designed by FIH Mobile. Oppo and Vivo have rolled out models using HD (720p) 18:9 displays, while other vendors are using all-screen displays for their flagship models.However, 18:9 panels are hardly to completely replace 16:9 panels in the short term as smartphones equipped with 16:9 panels are still the mainstream models outside China. Nevertheless, prices of 16:9 panels have been rising since July 2107 as panel makers have continued reducing the production of such models.

With the popularity of the LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) networks growing at a pace slower than expected in part due to the difficulty in securing sufficient spectrum resources, a growing number of telecom operators including AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone, Deutsche Telecom, NTT Docomo and China Mobile, have paid more attention to the development of unlicensed spectrum technologies and related applications, according to Digitimes Research.While the number of new subscribers to 4G LTE services globally is expected to still hit a new high in 2017, the overall growth of subscribers to 4G LTE services has been slowing down, said Digitimes Research.In particular, the number of LTE-A networks in use, which are being implemented since mid-2011, accounted for only 33% of total LTE networks as of the third quarter of 2017, registering an increase of only 12pps compared to the same period of 2014.Digitimes Research believes that a lack of an effective and profitable business model for data services by mobile operators and an insufficient supply of 4G spectrum resources has resulted in lower-than-expected popularity of the LTE-A networks. Some iconic 4G LTE operators in the US, Japan, China and Korea have seen stagnant or even declining earnings from related sectors although their 4G revenues have continued to grow.Furthermore, some countries are still operating 2G, 3G and 4G networks simultaneously, which also limits spectrum resources available for 4G LTE services, delaying the deployments of LTE-A networks.

Global TFT LCD panel makers are expected to be able to accelerate the development of profiled all-screen panels to compete more effectively with the single dominating AMOLED all-screen panel vendor, Samsung Display, leveraging their improved technology and increasing output from 6G LTPS LCD and 6G-8.6G IGZO LCD production lines in the Greater China area, according to Digitimes Research.While also seeking to land AMOLED panel orders from Apple, a number of AMOLED panel suppliers, including LG Display, Japan Display (JDI) and Sharp, will continue to lose out such orders to Samsung Display at least in the first three quarters of 2018 as their developments of AMOLED panels have been slower than expected.However, it is highly likely that TFT LCD panel makers will be able to continue to maintain their share in the high-end smartphone panel segment as they have managed to improve the curved edge effects of their TFT LCD profiled panels, while screen burn-in will continue to be a common issue with OLEDs, which happens particularly after long-term use.

Voice-controled smart speakers has seen slower-than-expected demand in the Japan market, Digitimes Research has observed.Google Home and Line Clova Wave were launched in the Japan market in October 2017, followed by Amazon Echo in the following month, Digitimes Research indicated. The Japan market has lagged behind other main markets in launch of smart speakers because development of Japanese-language-based speech recognition and synthesis took much time and quite a large portion of Japanese consumers are reluctant to use speech-based control functions in front of other people.Japan-based Sony, Panasonic and Onkyo unveiled in-house-developed smart speakers at IFA 2017 taking place in Berlin, Germany, during September 1-6, with these models based on either Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa for speech recognition. Toppan Printing has adopted in-house-developed speech recognition technology for AISonar, a smart speaker for commercial use to guide customers at banks.

The China government has been actively promoting the development of LPWAN (low-power wide area network)-based IoT market and set NB-IoT as its standard technology, according to Digitimes Research.China's top-three telecom operators, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom, have come out with their respective strategies to develop related IoT businesses with subsidies and to accelerate their deployments in the segment through cross-industry alliance partnerships.However, the top-three telecom operators are not only promoting the development of the NB-IoT (LTE Cat-NB-1) standards, but also the eMTC (Enhanced Machine-Type Communications) (LTE Cat-M1) standards, making China one of the very few countries globally to deploy both the NB-IoT and eMTC networks.While China's LPWAN networks are expected to enter commercial operations in 2018, the fact that most NB-IoT chips supporting the LTE R14 standards will not be available until early 2018 and the lack of support of NB-IoT/eMTC dual-mode chips at the moment may disrupt the schedule of part of the application services, Digitimes Research indicated.

The dirty little secret of flash drives today is that many of them are running on yesterday's interfaces. While SATA and SAS have undergone several iterations since they were first introduced, they are still based on decades-old concepts and were initially designed with rotating disks in mind. These legacy protocols are bottlenecking the potential speeds possible from today's SSDs.NVMe is the latest storage interface standard designed specifically for SSDs. With its massively parallel architecture, it enables the full performance capabilities of today's SSDs to be realized. Because of price and compatibility, NVMe has taken a while to see uptake, but now it is finally coming into its own.Serial Attached LegacyCurrently, SATA is the most common storage interface. Whether a hard drive or increasingly common flash storage, chances are it is running through a SATA interface. The latest generation of SATA - SATA III - has a 600 MB/s bandwidth limit. While this is adequate for day-to-day consumer applications, it is not enough for enterprise servers. Even I/O intensive consumer use cases, such as video editing, can run into this limit.The SATA standard was originally released in 2000 as a serial-based successor to the older PATA standard, a parallel interface. SATA uses the advanced host controller interface (AHCI) which has a single command queue with a depth of 32 commands. This command queuing architecture is well-suited to conventional rotating disk storage, though more limiting when used with flash.Whereas SATA is the standard storage interface for consumer drives, SAS is much more common in the enterprise world. Released originally in 2004, SAS is also a serial replacement to an older parallel standard SCSI. Designed for enterprise applications, SAS storage is usually more expensive to implement than SATA, but it has significant advantages over SATA for data center use - such as longer cable lengths, multipath IO, and better error reporting. SAS also has a higher bandwidth limit of 1200MB/s.Just like SATA, SAS, has a single command queue, although the queue depth of SAS goes to 254 commands instead of 32 commands. While the larger command queue and higher bandwidth limit make it better performing than SATA, SAS is still far from being the ideal flash interface.NVMe - Massive ParallelismIntroduced in 2011, NVMe was designed from the ground up for addressing the needs of flash storage. Developed by a consortium of storage companies, its key objective is specifically to overcome the bottlenecks on flash performance imposed by SATA and SAS.Whereas SATA is restricted to 600MB/s and SAS to 1200MB/s (as mentioned above), NVMe runs over the PCIe bus and its bandwidth is theoretically limited only by the PCIe bus speed. With current PCIe standards providing 1GB/s or more per lane, and PCIe connections generally offering multiple lanes, bus speed almost never represents a bottleneck for NVMe-based SSDs.NVMe is designed to deliver massive parallelism, offering 64,000 command queues, each with a queue depth of 64,000 commands. This parallelism fits in well with the random access nature of flash storage, as well as the multi-core, multi-threaded processors in today's computers. NVMe's protocol is streamlined, with an optimized command set that does more in fewer operations compared to AHCI. IO operations often need fewer commands than with SATA or SAS, allowing latency to be reduced. For enterprise customers, NVMe also supports many enterprise storage features, such as multi-path IO and robust error reporting and management.Pure speed and low latency, plus the ability to deal with high IOPs have made NVMe SSDs a hit in enterprise data centers. Companies that particularly value low latency and high IOPs, such as high-frequency trading firms and database and web application hosting companies, have been some of the first and most avid endorsers of NVMe SSDs.Barriers to AdoptionWhile NVMe is high performance, historically speaking it has also been considered relatively high cost. This cost has negatively affected its popularity in the consumer-class storage sector. Relatively few operating systems supported NVMe when it first came out, and its high price made it less attractive for ordinary consumers, many of whom could not fully take advantage of its faster speeds anyway.However, all this is changing. NVMe prices are coming down and, in some cases, achieving price parity with SATA drives. This is due not only to market forces but also to new innovations, such as DRAM-less NVMe SSDs.As DRAM is a significant bill of materials (BoM) cost for SSDs, DRAM-less SSDs are able to achieve lower, more attractive price points. Since NVMe 1.2, host memory buffer (HMB) support has allowed DRAM-less SSDs to borrow host system memory as the SSD's DRAM buffer for better performance. DRAM-less SSDs that take advantage of HMB support can achieve performance similar to that of DRAM-based SSDs, while simultaneously saving cost, space and energy.NVMe SSDs are also more power-efficient than ever. While the NVMe protocol itself is already efficient, the PCIe link it runs over can consume significant levels of idle power. Newer NVMe SSDs support highly efficient, autonomous sleep state transitions, which allow them to achieve energy consumption on par or lower than SATA SSDs.All this means that NVMe is more viable than ever for a variety of use cases, from large data centers that can save on capital expenditures due to lower cost SSDs and operating expenditures as a result of lower power consumption, as well as power-sensitive mobile/portable applications such as laptops, tablets and smartphones, which can now consider using NVMe.Addressing the Need for SpeedWhile the need for speed is well recognized in enterprise applications, is the speed offered by NVMe actually needed in the consumer world? For anyone who has ever installed more memory, bought a larger hard drive (or SSD), or ordered a faster Internet connection, the answer is obvious.Today's consumer use cases generally do not yet test the limits of SATA drives, and part of the reason is most likely because SATA is still the most common interface for consumer storage. Today's video recording and editing, gaming and file server applications are already pushing the limits of consumer SSDs, and tomorrow's use cases are only destined to push them further. With NVMe now achieving price points that are comparable with SATA, there is no reason not to build future-proof storage today.(Jeroen Dorgelo is director of strategy at Marvell Storage Group)

While silicon remains the mainstream power semiconductor material, silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) are seen more suitable for power semiconductor devices needed by electric cars and mobile devices, as they can perform much better than Si in reducing on-state resistance and miniaturizing the size of power devices, thus helping the devices achieve fast charging, power consumption and high energy conversion functions. It is expected that the SiC and GaN power semiconductor markets will experience a higher growth than the Si semiconductor market by 2025, Digitimes Research believes.Taking advantage of mature technology and lower cost, Si power semiconductors recorded global market sales of over US$24 billion in 2016, compared to only US$200 million and US$14 million for SiC and GaN power semiconductors, respectively.Nevertheless, SiC and GaN are gradually replacing Si in specific applications, with SiC power semiconductor devices for applications with high power capacity, and GaN for applications involving medium to low power capacities.Digitimes Research estimates that the prices of SiC and GaN with high anti-compression strength will gradually decline in 2020, which will drive price cuts on those with medium to low compression resistance along with the refinements in production process and technologies as well as the entry of new players.Since 2015, both the US and China have seen Si power semiconductor manufacturers foray into the SiC and GaN semiconductor fields, and both Germany and Taiwan wafer foundry houses are also beginning to offer contract fabrication services for SiC and GaN semiconductors, which is expected to help drive down the prices of both semiconductors.In addition, Ga2O3 is emerging as a new material for power semiconductor, with its price getting close to that of Si but able to better reduce on-state resistance. This new material is expected to be applied for mass production of power semiconductor devices in 2018, and is likely to outgrow the GaN power semiconductor market by 2025, Digitimes Research estimates.

UV-C (in wavelength of 200-280nm) LED power output has increased to 70-75mW with application extending from disinfection of personal devices to medium-scale sterilization or purification.UV-C LED output increased from 10mW in 2014 to 50mW in 2016. South Korea-based LG Innotek and Japan-based Dowa Electronics earlier in 2017 unveiled 280nm UV-C LED chips with power output of 70mW and 75mW respectively.As users in the medical care and biotech sectors are less sensitive to price, prices and profitability for UV-C LED applications are relatively high with strong potential demand,The Minamata Convention on Mercury, which took effect on August 16, 2017, will restrict use of mercury beginning 2020, and stimulate demand for UV-C LED application to medium-scale water purification, Digitimes Research believes. Metawater, a water purification plant in Japan, has cooperated with Japan-based Nikkiso to develop a purification system based on 1,000 UV-C LED chips each with power output of 30mW, with a daily capacity to treat 2,000 tons of water.Currently, two types of substrates are used to make UV-C LED epitaxial wafers - aluminum nitride and sapphire, the former being more adopted. UV-C LED chips using aluminum substrates have higher luminous efficiency and longer service life than those using sapphire, but aluminum substrate prices are 1,000 times those for sapphire substrates.UV-C LED still faces technological barriers, such as in luminous efficiency and yield rates, to replacing 10-20W low-pressure mercury-vapor lamps which are widely used in sterilization currently.