As global AI investment continues to expand and US-China geopolitical pressure intensifies, how Taiwan and South Korea can preserve their semiconductor and manufacturing advantages has become a focal point. DIGITIMES and IC975 chairman Colley Hwang said the two sides should look for complementary strengths, work together to help Vietnam, Malaysia, and other countries develop, and first increase corporate exchanges to build a positive environment for cooperation.
As AI servers drive demand for higher-speed optical interconnects and co-packaged optics (CPO) moves toward volume production, silicon photonics testing is shifting from component-performance verification toward wafer-yield protection and earlier risk screening.
Samsung Electronics' in-house Exynos application processors (APs) are steadily regaining lost ground in the global smartphone market. Samsung's share of the global smartphone AP market rose to 9% in the second quarter of 2026, up 2 percentage points from the previous quarter and 3 percentage points from a year earlier, marking a second straight quarterly increase.
Altera, the programmable-chip maker backed by Silver Lake and Intel, has confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the US, positioning the company to tap renewed investor demand for semiconductor and AI-related businesses.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) chairman C.C. Wei and co-chief operating officer Y.J. Mii participated in the "Cross-Generational Dialogue: Questions and Answers for the AI Era" forum on September 15. Students asked how TSMC determines whether a technology is worth long-term investment when information is incomplete and the technological direction remains unclear, as well as how people can develop the ability to judge whether answers generated by artificial intelligence (AI) are true or false in the AI era.
The logic die at the bottom of a high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stack has become the semiconductor industry's newest contested territory. Within weeks, SK Hynix has been reported to be weighing Intel alongside TSMC, Samsung Electronics has been reported to be pairing its own foundry with TSMC, and Micron has confirmed that TSMC will manufacture its next-generation base die. What began as a single-vendor arrangement is turning into a multi-front sourcing contest — and the assumption that a second source automatically means a cheaper one is already being challenged.
Taiwan's AI server supply chain continued to show strong year-over-year growth in August, although performance varied significantly across baseboard management controller (BMC), cable/connector, and server-case suppliers.
Unigroup Guoxin Microelectronics plans to acquire WeEn Semiconductors for CNY1.9 billion (≈ US$283 million), giving the Chinese specialty IC supplier in-house wafer manufacturing and a faster route into power semiconductors.
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are preparing to move DRAM below the 10nm threshold in 2028, with the two memory makers pursuing different cell structures as conventional scaling becomes increasingly difficult.
At this year's China International Optoelectronic Expo (CIOE), Sivers Semiconductor brought two products to its booth that trace the trajectory of the optical networking industry: a 1.6T pluggable optical transceiver currently ramping toward mainstream adoption, and a prototype module built for external light source (ELS) architectures, a technology that could define the next generation of data center interconnects.
