South Korean IC design firm LX Semicon has deployed AI agents in the development of display driver ICs (DDIs), reducing the design time for a benchmark image-processing engine from 10 days to two. The company said two large-size LCD TV DDI products developed with the technology have reached tape-out, with mass production planned for early to mid-2027 for television panels in Greater China.

TPCA Show Taipei 2026, organized by the Taiwan Printed Circuit Association (TPCA), opened on October 20. Unimicron Technology chairman S.C. Chien delivered a keynote at the opening ceremony, discussing key opportunities for printed circuit board (PCB) industry development in the artificial intelligence (AI) era.

Samsung Electro-Mechanics has secured a KRW360.5 billion (US$271.8 million) long-term contract to supply package substrates for memory semiconductors, strengthening its position in the growing AI server component market.

AI processor performance continues to improve, but memory bandwidth is growing more slowly, making data supply a major constraint on AI chip performance and energy efficiency. Efforts to shorten the distance between memory and compute units and increase die-to-die interconnect density are driving advances in HBM, advanced packaging and 3D integration.

Nvidia is positioning its Vera CPU as a central component of data-center infrastructure for agentic artificial intelligence, as multistep reasoning and tool calls increase demand for fast serial processing. The company says CPU resources are gaining importance alongside GPUs, while declining GPU-to-CPU ratios signal a potential redesign of AI computing architectures.

Samsung Electro-Mechanics (SEMCO) has signed a long-term supply agreement worth KRW360.487 billion (approximately US$260 million) with a major global company for memory packaging substrates, with shipments scheduled to begin in 2027. The company did not disclose the customer or specific application, but the deal expands its long-term contract coverage from multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) and silicon capacitors into substrates.

Packaging, substrate, printed circuit board (PCB), and assembly makers need closer coordination to meet the demands of AI and high-performance computing (HPC), as package-to-board integration becomes a growing technical bottleneck, industry executives said at IMPACT 2026 in Taipei.

India's first commercial chip fab is opening a long-awaited new market for the country's chemical makers, but the companies best placed to profit in the near term are Japanese, South Korean, and European materials suppliers that already have the purification know-how and customer trust that chipmakers demand.

Japan plans to provide an additional JPY400 billion (US$2.5 billion) to support Rapidus' advanced semiconductor production between fiscal 2027 and fiscal 2029, as the government seeks to achieve mass production of 2nm chips in fiscal 2027. Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) presented the latest policy on October 19, according to reports from Reuters, Nikkei Asia, and BigGo Finance. The funding would be provided as an industrial investment between April 2027 and March 2030.

TPCA Show 2026 officially opened, with Unimicron Chairman Shan-Chieh Chien saying in his opening address that solving the three major challenges facing AI accelerators in high-performance computing (HPC) will require more than semiconductor process scaling. Advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration technologies must be introduced in parallel, significantly raising the technical requirements for the PCB and substrate industries.

Tongtai Machine & Tool said it had order visibility for its printed circuit board (PCB) drilling equipment through the end of 2027 as AI infrastructure demand increased pressure on high-end board production. The Taiwan-based machine tool maker presented its latest solutions at the Taiwan Printed Circuit Association Show 2026, highlighting CCD high-precision drilling machines and an unmanned drilling-station system for AI server boards and IC substrates.