Gorilla Technology Inc will join their partner Zoomtech this year to demonstrate State Safety and Enterprise Security solutions at Interpol World from July 2-4 at the Sands Expo Centre in Singapore.Gorilla IVAR, an edge AI video analytics product optimized by Intel's OpenVINO toolkit, has been used widely in transportation safety, sea and land border control, and criminal vehicle tracking. Combining big data, data statistics, and correlation analysis helps law enforcement officers efficiently improve case handling techniques through science and technology. Traffic management and direction analysis of vehicles have also been a great asset for various traffic enforcement units. Law enforcement in Taiwan, Thailand, and the middle east have worked closely with Gorilla and our smart and safe solutions including IVAR on cases from suspect vehicles to bank heists. This has led to an overall decrease in known illegal activities.Zoomtech is a global leader in their field of auto-gate and turnstile access solutions. Their mission to provide the best customer satisfaction through high quality standards can be seen and experienced first-hand in many airports, offices, banks, and casinos. Gorilla and Zoomtech recently partnered to focus more deeply on security and access control for both border control and enterprise security in Asia.At the show, Gorilla will present and give experiential demonstrations on AI-based solutions from State Safety with Security Convergence to Smart Enterprise with IVAR. Visitors to Zoomtech booth C13 will have the opportunity to experience improved field security for alerting to stray guests, intrusions, and unauthorized personnel through superior face recognition combined with the latest smart access control system. This includes scheduled main entrance and area monitoring, black and white lists, suspicious behavior analysis capabilities, and more.Spincer Koh, Gorilla CEO, will give a brief talk on the solutions outlined above as well as on Gorilla's pioneering concept of Security Convergence at 3:30PM on the show's opening day, July nd. Gorilla's Security Convergence solution can detect, locate, and map malicious attacks as well as infected devices that cannot be detected by firewalls - all in real time. This reduces potential damages while law enforcement can enhance verification for a more robust system or data center by combining face recognition and MOTP (Mobile One Time Password) to create a multi-factor authentication login system.The overall focus of Interpol World this year is "Engaging co-creation to prepare for future security threats" and with partners like Zoomtech and cutting edge solutions like IVAR and Security Convergence, Gorilla is poised to impress at the show.More information about Gorilla Technology and their solutions can be found on their website: https://www.gorilla-technology.comGorilla to showcase security solutions at Interpol World 2019 in Singapore

As a company that provides the architecture at the heart of modern computing, Arm aims to maintain its leading role in the emerging machine learning (ML) market by leveraging its existing advantages to drive the widespread application of ML on various edge devices.At Computex 2019, Jem Davies, Arm Fellow, VP, and GM, Machine Learning Group, explained Arm's views and strategies on the development of the ML market, emphasizing that Arm is the only vendor in the market that has the broad portfolio of CPU, GPU and NPU, as well as strong ecosystem support. By adopting a total compute approach, Arm will be able to provide the best integrated solutions to address the challenges today, in a bid to enable huge possibilities of ML applications.ML is going everywhere"There is no doubt that ML is going everywhere," Davies said. Arm estimates that there are 4 billion smartphones in the world, and 85% of smartphones run ML only on CPU or CPU+GPU. And looking at the most common use cases, ML is already taking place on the CPU from Google Translate, "Bokeh" focus on Instagram, speech recognition to 3D secure login.In addition, Davies stressed, "Some ML algorithms are used in the areas that we never thought of before. For example, in voice recognition, traditionally, we need to perform audio processing, such as noise cancellation, microphone separation, and beam forming, and then run ML algorithm. But now, you can directly throw the raw microphone data to ML algorithm and it will clear up the noise itself. Or, tell you what's wrong when you are running by putting air pressure sensors into your shoes.""More and more we have seen that ML is used in a very disruptive way, and the trend surprises lots of people. With the huge amount of available data at the edges and in the cloud, we expect an explosion of creativity in the future, and Arm will strive to unleash the possibilities with our wide range of ML-optimized solutions."ML is a software problemFrom Arm's perspective, ML is fundamentally a software problem. "ML starts with the CPU, and every device that runs ML has a CPU, which runs the code or hands it to the GPU or NPU. That's why we enhance our Cortex-A and Cortex-M cores to run ML more efficiently, and also introduces dedicated ML processors to address the requirements of higher performance and power efficiency."Davies said that it's Arm's unique advantage to put CPU/GPU/NPU designers and software architects who optimize the codes for CPU/GPU/NPU in the same room, so that we can produce the RTL simulation for the code running for the three processors. Arm is capable of enabling hardware and software together seaminglessly."By taking a holistic view on this, Davies believes that Arm can provide the most flexible and integrated ML solutions to meet customers' different requirements. With a common hardware architecture, Arm aims to strengthen its software and ecosystem supports to help accelerate ML deployment and overcome the fragmentation challenges that the industry is facing today."We have one of the biggest computing ecosystem, but for ML, it's quite different from the existing one, since there are lots of new players coming into this new area," Kathleen Kallot, Director, Machine Learning Ecosystem, ML Group, said. "It's important for us to engage with key partners. For example, we are partnering with Google to develop TensorFlow Lite Micro for embedded devices.""In addition, as ML algorithm players are key to drive innovation, we also need to engage directly with them, to make sure they can get the best performance out of our IPs. We can expect lots of things coming this year and next year, and the ecosystem is building very fast."Arm's ML processorAs ML emerges, domain-specific computing becomes a buzzword in the market. As a leading general-purpose computing technology provider, Davies stressed that Arm has been in the domain-specific game for 15 years, saying, "Of course, we provide CPU, and as display function gets important, we have developed GPU and make it successful in the market. And now, as the market evolves, we also move into the ML processor segment."In fact, it's Jem Davies that makes Mali GPU a successful story at Arm, and now he wants to repeat the history again in the ML game. "For some tasks require higher efficiency, they might need domain-specific processors to run the specific workloads. For us, ML processor is just the domain-specific processor for neural network computing to handle matrix arithmetic and convolution.""From a system perspective, we will not push people to use ML processors. Depending on different use cases, customers need to figure out what the best way is to run the ML code, and sometimes, maybe the CPU is enough."Being a part of Arm's complete portfolio, ML processor boasts an industry-leading power efficiency of 5 TOPs/W and outstanding performance of up to 4 TOP/s. Also, with multicore scalability, it can scale up to eight NPUs and 32 TOPs in a single cluster or 64 NPUs in a mesh configuration. "Data compression technology is important for ML processor development. With our advantage in GPU and video, we will bring that into ML," Davies stressed.Taking a holistic approach to prevail in the ML marketWith so many existing and new players jumping into the NPU market, Davies is confident that Arm will still prevail in this area, saying, "Different from other companies, we consider ML a software problem, not a hardware one. That's why we invest lots of resources to make Arm NN good and easy to use for developers, since making software run efficiently on Arm cores is our job."Though Arm is not the first one to move into NPU market, he said that it gives us the "second-mover advantage", so that we can learn from those who claim to be the first, and provide something better.As ML market is highly fragmented with many different software and hardware architectures, Davies said, "The ecosystem wants one solution and only tolerates 2 or 3, there is no way to have two hundreds solutions in the market. So we will see that lots of players will be out of business.In particular, most of the start-ups are focusing on developing ML hardware, and they don't have enough resources to write software and build the ecosystem."On the other hand, Davies has seen amazing innovation in the ML algorithm space, "These new players are very important to our ecosystem, we will do our best to leverage their expertise to enable more possibilities."He summarized that, to truly unlock the next generation of ML use cases, we need the building blocks optimized and built together from the ground up. And Arm can provide that total compute solutions from hardware, software, and ecosystem to actually fulfill the market needs.Jem Davies, Arm Fellow, VP, and GM, Machine Learning GroupArm "Total Compute" provides the best integrated solutions to enable huge possibilities of ML applications

Specializing in developing and marketing standardized power supply products, Mean Well expanded into the medical power supply segment in 2000 by leveraging its market insight and technological strength. It now offers more than 500 models of medical power supplies in its product portfolio to meet every requirement on power solutions by medical equipment for diagnosis, treatment, lab test and home care purposes. With years of efforts, Mean Well has quickly risen to the No. 8 position in terms of its market share in the segment.According to IHS, the global medical power supply market has a value close to US$500 million. The segment with a much smaller scale compared to power supplies for consumer and IT devices puts up a high technological barrier as medical power solutions impose more stringent requirements than industrial-grade power solutions. Vendors that are able to secure a market position in the segment will not be easily overtaken. Eying the niche opportunity, Mean Well has been putting efforts toward this segment for nearly two decades and has received positive results. Medical power supply products generate NT$1 billion in revenue for Mean Well, representing about 3.3% of the company's total revenue of NT$30.6 billion. The share may be small but the growth potential is promising.Compliance with a full range of safety standards represents a guarantee of premium product quality"A power supply may only account for a small portion in the total costs of a medical device but a power supply failure will definitely hinder a medical device's normal operation," noted Rui-Ching Chen, product manager, Meal Well, as he drew an analogy between the human heart and a medical power supply. "There can be no compromise in the quality, safety, reliability and durability of medical power supplies."Mean Well is fully prepared for the foray into the healthcare market. Its manufacturing facilities are ISO13485 certified and its products comply with a complete range of medical equipment standards including IEC60601-1, EN60601-1, ANSI and AAMI ES60601 Edition 3, in addition to rigorous EMC specifications.To guarantee safety, all Mean Well medical power supplies are designed to comply with current leakage, 2XMOPP/2xMOOP isolation level and stress test qualifications for medical devices. "Our medical power supplies are Type BF (Body Floating), meaning they can be used in medical devices that have direct contact with patients," emphasized Chen.A comprehensive product portfolio meets every customer requirementMean Well makes every effort to ensure that all its medical power supplies are safe to use. On top of that, Mean Well provides a complete range of power solutions to suit every requirement of medical devices for all kinds of medical uses, including AC-DC external adapters, encapsulated power supply, modular power supply, PCB type, and DC-DC modules with power ratings in the range from 1W to 1200W.Mean Well plans to showcase multiple flagship medical power supplies at Medical Taiwan, to open on June 27, 2019. The products on exhibit include the NMP650/1K2 (650W/1200 W), MSP-1000 (1000W), MPM /MFM-05~30 (5W~30W), RPS-120S (120W), RPS-500 (500W) and GEM60I (60W) series.The intelligent modular medical power supply NMP650/1K2 series (650W/1200W) offers the configuration flexibility of multiple outputs and various intelligent control functions. Chen further pointed out, "NMP650/1K2 enables flexible adjustments of output voltage to accommodate different voltage requirements by large medical equipment such as the da Vinci Surgical System and computed tomography (CT) scanners." Mean Well's NMP650/1K2 series provides up to six different output voltages.Housed in the same casing as the previous generation MSP-600, the MSP-1000 (1000W) allows customers to boost the power supply from 600W to 1000W with the same footprint, thereby saving costs and efforts. For example, as medical technologies make leaping advances, 600W power supplies may not be enough for biochemical analyzers that come with increasing rotation speeds and thus require more power. In view of such needs, Mean Well offers a way for customers to upgrade their power supply without having to change the casing.Digitization and miniaturization is the future trendFeaturing small size and low energy consumption, the MPM /MFM-05~30 (5W~30W) series high-density miniature on-board power supplies come with a 45.7mm x 25.4mm x 21.5mm dimension and low no load power consumption less than 0.075W to significantly reduce overall system power consumption. Mean Well plans to launch 45W, 65W and 90W models this year, according to Chen.The RPS-120S (120W) is a high-performance compact PCB-type medical power supply with a 3"x 2" footprint. It can operate up to 120W without the need for an external fan. "Compared to other PCB-type power supplies of similar sizes on the market, Mean Well's RPS-120S is only one capable of supplying more than 100W with no need for an external fan. This is achieved by enhancing the efficiency and making use of heat sink," emphasized Chen.The RPS-500 is available in multiple form factors, including bare PCB, fanless covered, as well as chassis mount with built-in fans, to offer a wide range of medical power supply solutions for customers to choose from. It should be noted that Mean Well is only manufacturer on the market capable of providing a 5"x3" medical-grade product offering up to 500W (the fanless model can supply up to 300W). Furthermore, the GEM60I (60W) medical-grade wall-mount type adapter features easy portability, interchangeable AC plugs for operation in the U.S., U.K., Australia and European countries and compliance with IEC60601-1-11 home care standards.Since the foray into the medical power supply segment in 2000, Mean Well has stayed ahead of customer needs and will continue to develop digitized and miniaturized power supply solutions, so that Mean Well can grow with customers to meet the smartization and miniaturization trends of medical devices.The complete range of Mean Well medical power supplies fully meets customer needs

The population in Africa has grown over 1.2 billion and the consumer market is huge. Most of the industries are still in the early stage. In such a vast and fast growing market, establishing a cooperative relationship with the local enterprises is particularly important. Proscend initially focused on SHDSL and VDSL2 P2P equipment and became one of the leading providers in this field.Over the past five years, Proscend has not only developed a complete line of industrial-grade DSL and Long Reach PoE Switch products but also dedicated in developing industrial-grade mobile communications by launching a full range of Industrial LTE Cellular Routers for use in surveillance system, power plants and smart transportation projects. Because of its professional R&D capabilities and technical support strength, Proscend's industrial-grade communications solutions have quickly gained trust and recognitions by its international customers, and successfully deployed to the United States, Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, India, Israel and etc.Proscend has some existing partners which have been cooperating with us in several countries of Africa. To expand business, Proscend is pleased to attend a trade mission for African market organized by TAITRA in this June, and will take this opportunity to promote products which covering Industrial LTE Cellular Router series, Long Reach PoE Switch series, SHDSL series, VDSL 2 series, …, etc. Proscend relies on both professional capabilities and strong support services to international market. For example, an industrial-grade LTE cellular router featuring PoE power supply and Dual-SIM slot design has been integrated into remote monitoring and control applications by an international renowned security cabinet system manufacturer. The VDSL2 SFP series, converts optical equipment into DSL signals via copper cable to reduce the high cost of new wiring. It has been widely used in Europe, the United States, New Zealand and Australia.Proscend is committed in cultivating local markets. Recently, Proscend Communications India Private Limited, a subsidiary of Proscend in the Indian market, participated in the largest smart cities India exhibition. The local customers responded enthusiastically and were highly interested in further cooperation. Proscend has the confidence to carry the experience from Indian market to African market in similar way. Africa is the second largest continent in terms of area and population as well as the booming growth of macro economy. Proscend is in pursuit to build up long-term partnership with local partners.In addition to business promotion, Proscend also cares about the need and desire for digital learning from young generations in Africa. Proscend is a proud sponsor of NTHUpendo Volunteers for Education in Tanzania. NTHUpendo is a volunteer program from "National Tsing-Hua University" that provide PCs and share ICT knowledge to the people in Tanzania. By giving information education training and supporting relevant software and hardware resources, we hope collaboratively improve the lack of education resources in Africa and satisfy the need of local students for digital learning. Through the exchange of cultures, we wish to spread our love and hope to Africa.Proscend industrial LTE PoE cellular router

Fenergo, a leading provider of Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions for financial institutions announced its entry into the Taiwanese market through a partnership with Tung-I Information Services, a Taiwanese provider of solutions powered by artificial intelligence (AI) in finance, information security, private cloud implementation and smart retail.As an exclusive CLM partner, Fenergo will provide Tung-I's current and prospective Taiwanese clients access to advanced Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) capabilities, further strengthening the company's offering. To ensure a seamless client experience, Tung-I will provide local support, maintenance and implementation of Fenergo's CLM solutions.The partnership comes in response to recent evaluations by the Asia/Pacific Group (APG) to prevent money laundering related crimes in Asia Pacific. The inter-governmental organisation, which consists of 41 member jurisdictions including Taiwan, reviewed Taiwan's AML practices in November 2018. The results, due to be announced in July 2019, are expected to have a profound impact on the country's ability to handle financial transactions worldwide."Our partnership with Tung-I marks our entry into the Taiwanese market, and further solidifies our expansion into APAC," said Julian Clarke, global head of Partnerships and Alliances. "The Fenergo partnership programme is constantly evolving as we continue to build a strong and trusted network of partners such as Tung-I across the globe and leverage local connections by having a partner with an established reputation in the region.""Our banking clients require a CLM solution that transforms how they manage clients from initial onboarding, KYC/AML compliance, client data management and KYC reviews," said Tseng-Wei Chao, Executive Director at Tung-I. "Fenergo is a leader in this space and for us was the most obvious choice to partner with in helping our clients across Taiwan meet full compliance with risk and regulatory obligations throughout their entire lifecycle.""Regulatory rules are ramping up in APAC with differing requirements between countries. It's important that firms in the region have a solution that fulfils all obligations and eases the pressure off compliance teams," said Kyoka Li, APAC director of Sales, at Fenergo. "It's clear that APAC needs to get moving and this partnership with Tung-I comes at a crucial time ahead of APG checks where financial institutions in Taiwan must ensure they are future proofed and meet regulatory and compliance requirements."

Foxconn Technology Group founder Terry Gou has noted that G2 - the US and China - will replace G20 in a new leadership framework: one world, two systems.Gou made the remarks at the G2 and Beyond forum that Digitimes organized in Taipei on June 22. The forum also featured SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son and Katerra chairman Michael E Marks.Gou expressed optimism in his dialogue with the present writer at the event that the upcoming meeting between US president Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping at the 2019 G20 Summit to be held June 28-29 in Osaka, Japan will provide an opportunity for both countries to break stalemates in trade talks,The G2 imposes decisive influences in the global ICT industry development, with the US commanding over 50% of the world's top-10 tech firms and startup unicorns and China taking 25%.Digitimes statistics show that of the world's top-10 tech firms as of June 2019, six come from the US, two from China and one each from Taiwan and Korea. Microsoft leads the list with a market cap of over US$1 trillion, and China's Tencent and Alibaba are also among the 10 most influential tech firms.CB Insights tallies also indicate that there are 360 unicorn startups around the world as of mid-June 2019, with 177 unicorns (49%) coming from the US, followed by China with 90 (25%), the UK with 19 (5%) and India with 16 (4%), indicating the US and China are dominating the world's future tech innovations.Growing influences in emerging sectorsActually, China also shows growing influence in emerging sectors such as electrical vehicles (EV) and 5G. But all these rely on the support of crucial semiconductor components, which are now dominated by US suppliers. Once the US - despite all possible impact - decides to ban US firms from shipping key IC components and technologies to China, then China is likely to become a paper tiger. In this regard, the only concern for the US is how to prevent such prohibitive actions from hitting its domestic businesses too hard and even causing global economic recession.Qualcomm has seen 67% of its chipset shipments destined for China, Broadcom 50%, with Micron, TI and Intel also highly relying on the China market. The Trump administration's ban on Huawei is going to hit hard US suppliers and even Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, and Huawei's revenues could drop by up to US$30 billion in two years.Moreover, once the US decides after the G20 meeting to levy 25% tariffs on the final batch of US$325 billion in Chinese imports, not only Taiwan ODMs of notebooks and handsets will suffer significantly but US consumers will also have to pay much higher prices for the products subject to the high tariffs. Many US tech firms Apple, HP, Dell and Microsoft are likely to face disastrous results.Gou's recipes for minimizing trade lossesTo minimize possible trading losses, Gou said that the best solution is for the US to allow its suppliers to continue shipping components for general commodities such as notebooks, handsets, and TVs, instead of enforcing a blanket ban on all shipments. This way, China will remain both a production base and an export outlet for major US vendors and their supply chains.As to 5G and semiconductor development projects, both countries can negotiate over possible cooperation patterns, under the prerequisite that the US continues to control the 5G construction progress and upstream IC materials and design technologies, according to Gou.As Foxconn maintains major investments in China and the US and handles large-size contract production orders for US vendors, Gou is quite aware of market uncertainties and possible changes arising from the trade war. He said what Taiwan can do now is to ready diverse solutions and develop high-quality products for domestic demand, paving the way for exporting them in the future.Beyond satisfying the demands of the US and China, Taiwan can also extend their industry prowess to Southeast Asia, Gou said, adding that agile Taiwan makers can always find new opportunities and survival space amid volatile market environments, regardless of the development and outcome of the US-China trade conflicts.Foxconn founder Terry Gou (right) in a dialogue with Digitimes president Colley Hwang (left)Photo: Michael Lee, Digitimes, June 2019

Michael E Marks, incumbent chairman of Katerra and former CEO of Flextronics has pointed out that Taiwan should focus on the manufacturing of products with premium values instead of mass production of entry-level devices.Marks made the comments at the G2 and Bedyond forum that Digitimes organized in Taipei on June 22, which also featured SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son and Foxconn Technology Group founder Terry Gou.Marks pointed out that technologies have changed a lot over the years. In the early 1980s, most of the technology companies were relatively small, but now tech firms have become the most important ones in the world, which gives Taiwan an important role to play in the existing ICT ecosystem.He believes that Taiwan is in a perfect position in the supply chain today because of its high-quality education, strong engineering, good working ethics, and respect for intellectual property, and fair amounts of capital. With these resources coming together, Taiwan has great opportunities to advance to a new level in the technology space.Marks noted that the tech industry has changed from a field filled with discrete products to a series of tools that are used to disrupt other old industries.Citing Softbank's investments as an example, Marks pointed out that many of the firms that the Japanese conglomerate has invested in are applying technology tools such as cloud, software, robotics and AI, to traditional businesses to create massive new opportunities within these industries, with Taiwan's upstream supply chain playing a major part in facilitating these opportunities.Marks noted that Katerra is a technology construction company that applies new methods to create new-generation smart factories, hospitals and residential buildings. The company also has formed partnerships with Taiwan's ICT upstream suppliers including Delta Electronics provides a smart energy system and Kinestral that supplies smart windows.Marks pointed out that the smart energy system that Katerra and Delta has jointly developed is able to cut 70% of used space compared to other available systems in the market, while the costs are 30% lower and energy consumption is 40% less. He stressed such systems can only be accomplished by Taiwan's makers.Marks said that Taiwan is perfectly positioned to do new technologies for all kinds of smart industries as many western enterprises are finding it difficult to acquire solutions with such high technology from China or India.Marks believes the semiconductor industry is becoming more and more important, while Internet of Things (IoT), software, sensors and AI will be found in every aspect of human life including cars, buildings and hospitals. Taiwan should focus investments in top-end manufacturing, smart products and applications, and find its position in the future ecosystem.Katerra chairman Michael MarksPhoto: Shihmin Fu, Digitimes, June 2019

Commenting on the US-China trade tensions and how they are affecting the ICT upstream supply chains in Taiwan, Japan and Korea, Digitimes president Colley Hwang has pointed out that the row is in fact a war between the two superpowers over control of technologies.The two superpowers' technology competition is deeply affecting the worldwide ICT supply chain and the semiconductor industry in particular, in both of which Taiwan plays key roles, Hwang said in his presentation at the G2 and Beyond forum that Digitimes organized in Taipei on June 22.The forum featured SoftBank Group chairman Masayoshi Son, Foxconn Technology Group founder Terry Gou and Katerra CEO Michael E Marks.Hwang pointed out that the first island chain has become the technology island chain where Taiwan, Japan and Korea are key members who are finding themselves in similar positions in the face of the US-China disputes.Despite the fact that the tensions are between the US and China, the battlefields are actually in the IT island chain, said Hwang, adding how to survive in their war has already become a major concern for these Asian tech-savvy countries.With the US government looking to reshape worldwide ICT ecosystem via four waves of tariffs, many Taiwan players have started shifting their production lines from China to other places including Taiwan, showing that hardware capability is a major safeguard that helps protect Taiwan's ICT industry, Hwang explained.But the semiconductor industry is the core barrier that truly defends Taiwan's ICT competitiveness. Because of Taiwanese semiconductor companies' strong influence, Taiwan is a critical part of the US-China trade tensions, and if Taiwan is able to carefully maneuver between the two superpowers, great opportunities are certainly awaiting Taiwan's ICT industry, Hwang said.Hwang pointed out that Taiwan's hardware manufacturers have created two million jobs worldwide and that is one of Taiwanese makers' major contributions to the world, but for the future, Taiwan should consider creating even higher added value. Taiwan needs to be friends with both the US and China, both of which need support from Taiwan's supply chain, he said.Korea has seen its major industries including steelmaking, petrochemical, car-making, shipbuilding, handset and flat panel surpassed by China, and the semiconductor sector is the next one at stake, Hwang said. But Taiwan should not play just a spectator role, as Taiwan's ICT industry is China's next target after Korea.Hwang pointed out that Taiwan's semiconductor industry and Samsung have close coopetition, with competition accounting for only around 10% of their businesses, and the rest coming from cooperation. There are actually many more cooperation opportunities between Taiwanese and Korean semiconductor firms, and that should be a direction the two sides need to head toward, which is necessary for them to survive the US-China war.Digitimes president Colley HwangPhoto: Michael Lee, Digitimes, June 2019

SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son believes artificial intelligence will bring the biggest paradigm shift in human history, revolutionize all industries.Son made the prediction during a forum, "G2 and Beyond," that Digitimes organized in Taipei on June 22.He cited some major paradigm shifts in recent history, such as the Industrial Revolution and the invention of motor cars.He said in 1850, 65% of the people in the US were farmers, and 36% were in the services and manufacturing sectors. As of 2016, only 2% of the US people are farmers, while 98% are in the manufacturing and services sectors.In 1900, horse-drawn carriages were the major transport on Fifth Avenue in New York, but 13 years later, they were rarely seen, replaced by motor cars, he said. And he predicted that on the same street in 2035, they will be almost all autonomous cars."I think now is a critical moment in our lifetime. This is the time of paradigm shift," Son told the audience, speaking in public for the time in Taiwan. "Information revolution has just begun."Since 1995, Internet traffic has grown one million times, and the market cap of Internet companies has grown exponentially in the same period.As of the end of 1994, only one of the top-10 companies in terms of market cap in the world was in the IT industry - namely IBM, Son noted. But as of June 2019, seven out of the top-10 are Internet-related companies - not even IBM is among them.But the Internet has revolutionized only two industries: advertising and retail, which account for 1% and 6% of the global GDP."AI is going to disrupt and change all industries," Son asserted. "If you think of the Internet traffic as traffic of simple data, AI traffic is traffic of information with intelligence.""AI is the biggest revolution in human history," the SoftBank chairman asserted.He said AI capacity enabled by quantum computer, or super-fast CPU or GPU, could be one millions times faster intelligence than humans.In the last 30 years, only three things have mattered in the information industry: the power of CPU, the memory capacity and communication speed, which have improved by one million times during the period, Son said, predicting that they would improve by another one million times in the next 30 years.He said in 30 years' time, AI could be one million times smarter than it is today, enabled advancements in technology, such as quantum computing."When that happens, I would say that super intelligence is coming," Son said, adding that 30 years from now AI could be "super genius," thousands of times more intelligent than human genius.But he is optimistic that AI will not be taking over all jobs from human beings, who are better in creativity.He said AI will be helping improve human life, solving many problems that cannot be solved today: such as avoiding car accidents and curing fatal diseases.To embrace the coming of the age of AI, Son said his company has created the SoftBank Vision Fund specializing in AI, investing in unicorns, and creating synergy.SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi SonPhoto: Shihmin Fu, Digitimes, June 2019

SoftBank Group chairman Masayoshi Son has disclosed that he was not invovled in Arm's decision to stop shipments to Huawei in the wake of the US ban on the Chinese handset and telecom equipment vendor."There is a misunderstanding, especially in China, that I stopped Arm shipments to China, but that is a complete misunderstanding," said Son during a Digitimes-organized forum in Taipei on June 22. It was the first time that Son has talked about the Arm decision in public.He said he was not aware of the decision until he read about it in the newspaper, as he is not involved in the day-in day-out running of the UK-based company, which SoftBank owns. He said Arm did not ask about his opinion before making the decision.He said Arm actually has not terminated its partnerships with Huawei, but it was acting in compliance with the US rule about banning shipments to Huawei for products with 25% or more of US-originated content.Arm has had to stop shipments to Huawei while checking which products are in that "25%" bracket, Son said. He said he does not know how that checking progress will last, but hopes it will be completed very quickly."Arm has not stopped its relationships with Huawei; Arm is studying which product is over 25% (in US-originated content), and which product is not," Son said.Arm is supposed to be able to ship to Huawei any product that is lower than 25%, he said. "Arm hopes to continue its relationship with Huawei," Son said.Son said he hopes to relist Arm in the stock maket in five years, but has not decided where it will be listed.The forum also marked the first time that Son has spoken in public in Taiwan. Joining him in the forum included Foxconn Technology Group founder Terry Gou and Katerra chairman Michael E Marks.SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi SonPhoto: Shihmin Fu, Digitimes, June 2019