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.

Statistics from US-based research body CB Insights show that non-US unicorn startups commanded a 50% share of total global unicorns as of the end of August 2017, sharply up from only 37% as of the end of 2014, indicating the US is no longer a dominant country in nurturing startups. It also suggests that against Asian enterprises, particularly those in China, unrelentingly pursuing development and growth, the Silicon Valley seems stuck in the status quo.Among Asian countries, China now takes the lead with 56 unicorns and India comes next with 10, with both countries being top targets for multinational investment funds. Korea ranks third with three unicorns, and Singapore and Indonesia have two each; but those unicorns in the two Southeast Asian countries all involve financial support from China tech giants.China's web population broke the 700 million mark to hit 731 million as of the end of 2016 after experiencing an annual growth of 6.2%, according to statistics released by the China Internet Network Information Center. The growth, however, has fallen under 10% for the first time in five years, indicating China's web population growth has entered a plateau period.Creating new miracles in new sectorsDespite the relatively stable web population, it will be increasingly difficult to create unicorn companies in the future. But in the emerging sectors such as Internet of Vehicles (IoV), FinTech and related services, China still stands a chance of creating new miracles, given the fact that in 2016 alone, the user numbers of ride-hailing services shot up 38% on year to 168 million in the country.Eyeing huge business opportunities associated with Internet investment, Beijing authorities officially launched the China Internet Investment Fund at a scale of CNY100 billion (US$15.14 billion) in late January 2017, with China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom all among strategic fund providers. China has become the world's largest e-commerce market, with its trading scale estimated by iResearch to hit CNY400 trillion by 2020. But, beyond capturing the huge business opportunities in the domestic market, China Internet investment funds and venture capital funds will surely extend their tentacles to emerging markets surrounding the Indian Ocean by taking advantage of their powerful financial resources and abundant experiences.China to be world's No. 1 venture fund source in two yearsAt the moment, one fourth of global venture capitals come from Silicon Valley. But as China contributed US$72 billion or 21.4% of total global venture capital funds in 2016, the country is expected to unseat the US as the world's largest source of such funds within two years. In fact, China tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu have been actively injecting funds to support startups, with Tencent, particularly, having invested in 19 unicorns, surpassing the corresponding figure of 13 recorded by Sequoia Capital in Silicon Valley.In May 2016, Google and Singapore-based Temasek Holdings jointly published a report on the digital economy of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), showing that total digital economy investments by the ASEAN member states already amounted to over US$200 billion. And startups in the ASEAN garnered financings of US$3.1 billion in 2016 and absorbed much more new funds of nearly US$5 billion in the first seven months of 2017. Among them, the Singapore-based ride-hailing platform operator Grab has absorbed US$3.44 billion in financing, and the Indonesian motorbike on-demand startup Go-Jek has obtained US$1.75 billion in funds, with both firms already on the name list of global unicorns. Who are the major fund providers behind ASEAN startups? Besides Japan's SoftBank, China's four Internet giants BATJ (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and JD.com) have contributed the most of the funds for those startups. Among them, Alibaba and Tencent are the most aggressive, with Alibaba having almost completed Alipay service deployments in main ASEAN member countries via investments by its financial service platform Ant Financial.Alibaba, Tencent aggressively expanding presence in ASEANTaiwan's New Southbound Policy - which aims at bettering trade ties with ASEAN and South India - still highlights the concept of hardware production. It seems that while Taiwan is still warming up for the race, Alibaba and Tencent are already miles ahead. As the main investor in Singapore's e-commerce platform Lazada, Alibaba has twice injected funds into the company, whose market value has now reached US$3.15 billion. In the ASEAN countries, Alibaba has demonstrated its determination to integrate and consolidate local payment flows by rendering Alipay services through its subsidiary Ant Financial.In fact, Taiwan's startups are not far away from the global stage, but they tend to confine themselves to only a small scale when soliciting venture capital funds. In facing the development of startups involving high risks and high investment returns, Taiwan has two questions to answer: Should the funnel's opening be widened to allow all nationals to join startups or let selected elites do the job? Should the country develop B2C startups or cultivate many mini-unicorns in the B2B or focus markets?(The comments are from a Chinese-language book "Borrowing East Wind: China-US Tech Wrestling and Taiwan" written by Colley Hwang, president of Digitimes.)