IC substrate and PCB maker AT&S (Advanced Technologies & Solutions) has been expanding its IC substrate manufacturing footprint in Asia before COVID-19 outbreak. It has moved equipment into the latest plant in Malaysia, slated to start high-volume manufacturing (HVM) in the second half of next year.

ChatGPT has swept across the world with roaring momentum, accumulating a million users in just five days. For comparison, Facebook and Netflix took 10 months and 41 months respectively to reach their first million users. Compared to predecessor platforms like IG, Facebook, Spotify, and Airbnb, ChatGPT's growth speed was staggering.

IFA Berlin 2023, one of the world's largest and most iconic consumer electronics exhibitions, will be held in Berlin, Germany from September 1–5. The exhibition targets the fourth quarter of the Christmas business and is expected to attract over 2,000 exhibitors from over 100 countries. IFA Management selected Taipei as the only key promotional city for the exhibition in Asia and partnered with the German Trade Office to host an industry trend seminar and media reception in Taipei on May 31.

I've been monitoring the industry since 1985. An industry leader has said that AI is eating software, and software is replacing hardware. But everyone understands that following the rise of ChatGPT, those in AI research or startup businesses are entering an age of "extinction," as the software sector is characterized by the reality that the winner takes all. The leader in the race will run away with almost all profits, with the rest subsisting on leftovers and most of the startups drowning. But the hardware industry is still strong because their customers are keen to diversify their sources of supplies, and individual companies can seldom take all the profits. And the hardware industry creates huge demand for technical workers. In terms of international coopetition and social justice, the value of hardware manufacturing is being reestablished. The US government's bid to rebuild meaningful control of the supply chain is recasting Taiwan into a more important role.

(CTA interview, please don't lock the story) Artificial intelligence development and adoption have encountered serious energy efficiency hurdles with current computer architectures. To solve this challenge, Canadian startup Blumind has invented an analog architecture for semiconductors that will process neural networks efficiently with extremely low power consumption.

News about significant improvements in yields and capacity on Samsung's 4nm process and the subsequent win in getting orders from AMD and Google raised some eyebrows among its competitors. How did Samsung make such a huge leap in such a short time? One cannot rule out the possibility that artificial intelligence (AI) may be the answer.

Canada-based startup pH7 Technologies has developed a new chemical process solution that can extract precious and critical metals, mainly platinum-group metals (PGM) from both primary and secondary sources. By utilizing an emerging branch of close-loop metallurgy called SolvoMetallurgy, pH7 provides an environmentally sustainable alternative to smelters and acid-based extraction methods.

Generally speaking, distributors categorize their customers into TBMs (Taiwan-based manufacturers), CBMs (China-based manufacturers) and MBMs (multination-based manufacturers). Production bases are being moved to ASEAN and South Asia, with large parts of their components supplies still coming from China and Hong Kong. But the major manufacturers remain Taiwanese. Semiconductors seemingly imported from China and Hong Kong actually come from Taiwanese makers. The OEMs still play an important role in determining how the components are distributed.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG)'s recent announcement of a strategic collaboration with Intel to deliver "enterprise-grade, secure AI" is an example of how industry leaders have been energized by the rise of generative AI to learn how this new technology can be used across businesses. DIGITIMES Asia recently spoke with BCG Henderson Institute Global Director François Candelon about the objectives behind this collaboration, and about the transformative potential of generative AI more broadly.

Chinese smartphone maker Oppo disbanded its chip design house Zeku in May, stimulating commentary on Zeku being the latest victim of the US-China chip war among the media in China. However, blaming geopolitical pressure for Zeku's failure does not help stakeholders to prevent the same mistake from recurring. Zeku's CEO Liu Jun and Oppo founder Duan Yongping made it clear: with sales far lower than expected, the investment needed for self-designed chips went through of the roof and it became prohibitively difficult to sustain the operation, thus they chose to correct the mistake sooner rather than later.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), the leading chip foundry company in China, is missing out on the opportunity brought by chiplet technologies, as Beijing Municipal Government specifically named chiplet technology as the primary investment target for achieving advanced chip manufacturing technology breakthroughs.

The keynote for the 2023 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is set to be held on June 5, 10:00 am PT. However, with the presentation less than a month away, Apple has been making moves and has seemingly shown its cards. What is Apple trying to achieve?

India stands on the cusp of a transformative leap into the semiconductor manufacturing sector, a move anticipated to significantly diversify and enhance the nation's predominantly software-centric talent pool.

In the two decades between 2000 and 2020, Taiwanese firms did business in China rarely in collaboration with one another. For the manufacturing of notebooks and handsets, whoever managed to obtain the orders at the expense of competitors would emerge as the winner. It was a zero-sum game. Therefore, the stock market would favor those who were in the Apple supply chain. And any proposal for inter-company cooperation would usually be seen as something with a hidden agenda.

Taiwan's top three lithium battery cell manufacturers right now are Formosa, Foxconn, and Taiwan Cement (TCC). Among them, Formosa Smart Energy Tech (FSET) was formed by integrating the five major corporations of the Formosa Plastics Group, including Formosa Plastics, NPC, FCFC, FPCC, and FBC. It has the largest publicly invested production capacity in Taiwan.