At the Semicon Network Summit 2026, speakers from Marvell, the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research's Holst Centre, the UK Semiconductor Centre, and the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association (TSIA) discussed the future of silicon photonics (SiPh). They said the industry's bottlenecks have shifted from materials to packaging precision, materials platform selection, and the manufacturing tools needed to support both.

Samsung Electro-Mechanics (SEMCO) is set to expand the scope of its price increases, with market reports saying the company will raise direct-supply prices for multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) sold to OEMs and ODMs in the fourth quarter of 2026, while ABF substrate prices are also climbing. With supply constrained and demand for AI servers strong, further price increases are likely in the near term.

SK Hynix boosted its silicon wafer purchases in the second quarter of 2026 by more than doubling spending from the previous quarter as it moved early to secure raw materials amid rising wafer prices and surging AI demand. The increase drew more attention than Samsung Electronics' modest rise over the same period.

Samsung Electronics is set to install 1,612 brand-new critical semiconductor back-end processing tools manufactured in South Korea at its factory under construction in Vietnam's Thai Nguyen province. Industry analysts say the move shows Samsung is accelerating efforts to turn Vietnam into a major semiconductor back-end manufacturing base.

LCY Advanced Materials unveiled a new wet chemical solution for next-generation high-density interconnects at the SEMICON Taiwan 2026 Heterogeneous Integration International Summit, as AI and high-performance computing rapidly push semiconductor manufacturing toward system-level scaling centered on advanced packaging.

The rise of physical AI is creating a new wave of demand for advanced sensors as robots move from controlled demonstrations toward practical deployment. Industry experts at SEMICON Taiwan 2026 said robots will need increasingly diverse sensing capabilities to perceive, interpret, and respond to complex real-world environments in real time.

Microsoft brought the semiconductor industry's own measure of success back to it on Wednesday, and argued that AI will be judged by it.

Sandisk says its NAND-based High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) technology can match HBM bandwidth while providing eight to 16 times the capacity at a similar cost, positioning flash memory closer to processors as inference workloads strain conventional memory systems.

Micron Technology is exploring tightly coupled DRAM that could deliver more than 10 times the bandwidth of HBM while using substantially less energy per bit, as the memory maker looks to new architectures to overcome the widening gap between processor performance and memory bandwidth.

A senior Lam Research executive told an industry audience this week that the next major leap in semiconductor manufacturing will not come from removing humans entirely from fabs, but from pairing collaborative robots with AI-driven predictive maintenance to close a long-standing gap in fab operations.

At a shared stage at Semicon Taiwan 2026, executives from Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron agreed that traditional 2.5D high-bandwidth memory (HBM) using interposers is approaching a performance ceiling. Consequently, the industry is transitioning toward 3D vertical stacking architectures to minimize transmission power consumption and leverage wafer-level bonding technologies.