South Korea's top three PCB suppliers SEMCO, LG Innotek, and Daeduck, after discontinuing their unprofitable PCB products and moving toward high-end IC substrates, have stabilized their PCB revenue and profitability in the past several years, according to DIGITIMES Research's latest report covering South Korea's PCB industry.

Since the timeframe for the evolution of communication technology has greatly shortened, 6G is now expected to be commercialized as soon as 2030. Compared to 5G, the next-generation technology needs to have superior performances in all manner of network transmission parameters and needs to consume less power to improve its energy consumption efficiency, both major challenges, according to DIGITIMES Research's latest study on telecom network technologies.

Following the launch of satellite communication-capable phones by Apple and Huawei in Q3 2022, other mobile phone companies have expressed interest in introducing similar phones or products. A growing range of collaborations between satellite operators, mobile phone manufacturers, and telecom operators have become highly anticipated. It is expected that more brands will join the party in 2023.

Broadband communication technologies such as LTE Cat.1bis and 5G NR-Light are gaining the attention of IoT chip developers for their new products with the phasing away of 2G and 3G networks, while IoT chips with RISC-V architecture have grown popular among Chinese chip suppliers, according to DIGITIMES Research's latest finding in the IoT chip industry.

Demand for GaAs-based power amplifiers (PAs) is expected to pick up gradually in the second half of 2023 with the recovery of smartphone shipments, according to DIGITIMES Research's study of the GaAs-based PA market.

Despite China's weak smartphone market, Apple's iPhone series has performed relatively well in 2022 and 2023, even seeing a slight increase in market share. The reason, however, could have less to do with the iPhone's performance and more to do with China's struggling economy which has led to a sales decline of mid- to low-end models, according to DIGITIMES Research.

Global smartphone application processor (AP) shipments are set to come to 1.114 billion units in 2023, down 11.8% on year, mainly due to declining smartphone shipments and slow AP inventory depletion.

Global smartphone shipments amounted to above 300 million units in the fourth quarter of 2022 and are estimated to go down to only around 260 million units in first-quarter 2023, slipping a double-digit percentage sequentially in both quarters, according to DIGITIMES Research's latest figures on the global smartphone market.

The competition among VR head-mounted devices (HMDs) has grown fiercer since the introduction of the Metaverse concept and pancake lenses, which can satisfy demand for an ultra-slim design, improve image quality, and support vision correction functionality, are becoming the mainstream optical solution for new VR HMDs, according to DIGITIMES Research's new study on VR products.

Various satellite projects and applications have been increasingly thriving, which leads to a huge amount of data transmission and processing. Such business opportunities attract cloud juggernauts including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to justle for the space market.

Taiwan's IC design industry has reached a critical crossroads, with an unclear development direction, worsening talent shortage, confusing government policies, and shrinking academic research momentum all requiring cooperation from all sectors to overcome. But in terms of a feasible development direction, datacenter server processors and HPC (high-performance computing) chips are believed to provide the most promising future for Taiwan IC designers, according to Eric Huang, vice president of DIGITIMES and host of the IC Design Industrial Policy White Paper team.

Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing sector boasts structural advantages in its next decade of development, but the advantages for its IC design sector are likely to change, according to Colley Hwang, president and founder of DIGITIMES.