MediaTek hosted MARC Workshop 2026 on June 24 through the MediaTek Advanced Research Center (MARC), recognizing the year's university-industry collaboration outcomes while outlining forward-looking R&D priorities in AI, satellite communications and next-generation connectivity.
South Korea's Ministry of Employment and Labor has launched chemical safety inspections at 25 semiconductor manufacturers, including SK Hynix, after a series of fluorine gas leaks at chip plants raised fresh concerns over industrial accidents.
South Korea's plan to push semiconductor investment beyond the greater Seoul area is taking clearer shape, with Samsung Electronics reportedly moving closer to a new chip hub in Gwangju while SK Hynix continues to weigh a site in South Jeolla Province against overseas investment options.
AI-driven hyperscale data center expansion is pushing the global AI race beyond raw GPU computing power into a broader contest over high-speed interconnects and electro-optical integration. As Nvidia's next-generation AI factory moves toward petabyte (PB)-scale data transfers, co-packaged optics (CPO) is heading toward commercialization, lifting the importance of key components such as fiber array units (FAU) and external laser sources (ELS).
Corning is studying South Korea as a possible manufacturing base for semiconductor glass substrates, a sign that the US specialty glass and optical materials maker is looking to extend its AI exposure beyond data-center connectivity into advanced chip packaging.
Academia Sinica has built a 20-qubit quantum chip from scratch, and the team now says the next phase is less about lab breakthroughs and more about engineering a scalable, reproducible manufacturing system. Chii-Dong Chen, executive director of Academia Sinica's Center for Quantum Computer, says Taiwan's quantum chip effort is moving into that engineering battleground.
SK Hynix is racing to complete the first cleanroom at its massive Yongin Semiconductor Cluster in Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, by February 2027, ahead of rival capacity expansion timelines. The site's first fabrication facility will break from conventional flat-floor layouts, stacking production floors three levels high in a pioneering triple-deck fab design.
Apple is preparing its biggest shift yet to the release strategy for its in-house Mac processors, opting to skip high-end M6 Pro and M6 Max chips and instead bring more powerful AI-focused M7 Pro and M7 Max processors to market in 2027, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the matter.
Academia Sinica's Center for Quantum Computer is focusing only on hardware, not algorithms or applications, and executive director Chii-Dong Chen said that approach is similar to the mission Taiwan's government gave ITRI in the early days of the foundry industry. He said Taiwan enjoys a strong advantage in quantum chip manufacturing, but turning the new Quantum Chip Fabrication Space (QC-Fab) into a technology transfer model for private companies will still require regulatory easing.
Japan is moving to anchor its long-term growth strategy around AI, semiconductors, and strategic infrastructure, as Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi seeks to use state-backed investment as a strategic push to lift private-sector spending and rebuild the country's industrial base.
On June 25, IBM unveiled what it calls the world's first sub-1nm chip technology: a 0.7nm — or 7 angstrom — transistor architecture built on an entirely new 3D platform called Nanostack. The announcement, timed to the VLSI 2026 symposium, marks the first time logic technology has extended below the 1nm node and, IBM says, opens a roadmap of at least a decade of further semiconductor scaling.
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