We all live in a connected world with ubiquitous sensors and connected devices. These connected devices are often powered by batteries without direct access to a power supply, which makes power consumption a top concern when choosing the appropriate wireless communication technology for IoT devices.

US AI accelerator IP startup Expedera successfully raised their series A funding of US$18 million in December 2021 to accelerate product development and market expansion for meeting the market's robust demand for deep-learning accelerator (DLA) semiconductor IP. DIGITIMES talked to VP Engineering and co-founder Siyad Ma and VP of Marketing Paul Karazuba to get to know the company, and understand the latest market trend and their expansion plans.

Move a thumb to unlock a car door. Self-check-in at an airport without touching the kiosk. These are no longer scenes in the movies but what technology is capable of nowadays. Motion Gestures, a Canada-based startup, has brought sophisticated camera-based hand tracking and gesture recognition solutions to various industry verticals, offering transformative experience to the modern world.

Porotech, a developer of microLED and GaN-based semiconductor technology, showcased what it called the world's first set of native indium gallium nitride (InGaN)-based red, green and blue microLED displays at 1920x1080 resolution with at least two million nits of brightness at Touch Taiwan 2022.

High-performance computing technology has been widely adopted in advanced countries to facilitate technological innovation, commercial big-data analytics, and aerospace missions. Taiwan's National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC), an institution under the National Applied Research Laboratories (NARLabs), also provides important high-speed computing resources such as high-speed network infrastructure and computing capabilities to support academia and industries in Taiwan. DIGITIMES interviewed NCHC's new director-general Chau-Lyan Chang, a former senior researcher in the Computational Aeronautics Science Division at NASA Langley Research Center. He returned to Taiwan in April 2022 to lead the Center. We asked him about his vision for the center and his perspective on high-performance computing technology's future outlook.

Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs plans to electrify 35% of the total 12,000 city buses by 2025 and 100% by 2030. Around 15,000 long-distance intercity buses will also be replaced by electric buses by 2030.

At the Smart Enterprise Forum hosted by Taiwania Capital and Asia Silicon Valley, the National Development Council chief Ming-Hsin Kung disclosed the outstanding performance of the industry related to the Internet of Things (IoT) technology and gave some policy guidance for the future.

Following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, global emphasis on hand hygiene has never been stronger. However, while people understand the need to wash their hands, many often neglect to sanitize their mobile devices, which are proven to be up to 18 times dirtier than a public toilet.

Streamlining the process of charging an electric vehicle (EV) is critical to the new energy car's adoption. The US-based Ample approaches the idea with battery swapping technologies. By offering efficient service as filling up gas, the startup is growing its deployment in America, Japan, and Spain.

InZiv, a technology provider of high-resolution inspection and repair of microLED, QLED, and OLED displays, announced that it has raised US$10 million in a Series A1 round led by BlueRed Partners, a Singapore based venture capital fund. Co-investors include OurCrowd, a number of Asian family offices, and existing investors. InZiv will use the capital to accelerate its product development of fast electroluminescence (EL) and photoluminescence (PL) automated solutions, make strategic company appointments, and expand its global presence with a particular focus on the US and Asia to support growing customer demand. The company has also announced that Yishai Klein, managing partner and co-founder of BlueRed Partners, and Itzhak Edrei, president emeritus of Tower Semiconductor, will be joining the board of directors.

"There are a lot of places where Asia will be the first," observed Nicolas Sauvage, president, and founder of TDK Ventures. For Ken Forster, executive director and founder of Momenta Ventures, Asian hardware manufacturers will have a large role to play in a future characterized by edgeware – software that runs on hardware at the edge.

UnaBiz, the IoT service provider and Sigfox Operator for Singapore and Taiwan, had won the bid and was appointed as the new owner of Sigfox, a French global network operator founded in 2010 that builds low-power wireless networks to connect objects such as utility meters.

Singapore-based Green Li-ion, a battery recycling technology provider, closed its Series A funding round with US$11.55 million on April 20, 2022.

AI, Big Data, Industry 4.0…by now we have already been familiar with these buzzwords defining the latest industrial revolution and technological progress. However, as the hardware and software industries increasingly overlap, few have begun to contemplate how the companies of the future will be built, especially with the digitalization of the real economies.

The post-pandemic world is unleashing a wave of digital transformation through a wide variety of sectors. Facing a series of supply chain bottlenecks, the industrial sector has also been gripped by this wave of digital transformation, especially when a series of bottlenecks induced by the pandemic and geopolitical factors have made it even more necessary to ensure more supply chain transparency and a higher level of resilience.