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Monday 7 September 2026
How UC Santa Cruz's Silicon Valley lab is reverse-engineering the human brain to solve AI's chip power crisis
As the global race for artificial intelligence (AI) consumes vast oceans of electricity and pushes modern utility grids to the brink, a team of California researchers is looking to biological neuroscience to build an entirely new class of energy-efficient microelectronics. Their objective is straightforward but radical: reverse-engineer the human brain to solve the semiconductor industry's looming power and thermal bottlenecks.
Monday 7 September 2026
Inside UC San Diego's 'Made with Taiwan' push to train TSMC's future engineers, reinvent chip packaging
The largest engineering school on the US West Coast by enrollment is training engineers for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and pioneering advanced 3D packaging design.
Monday 7 September 2026
South Korea secures US$2B from Air Products, Axcelis, Corning, Pacifico Energy to bolster supply chains
Four major US technology companies have committed a combined US$2 billion to investments across South Korea's semiconductor materials, equipment, and clean energy sectors. The move is expected to reinforce critical supply chain resilience between the US and South Korea while providing momentum for the South Korean government's three strategic "Mega Projects."
Monday 7 September 2026
Exclusive: Infineon Dresden fab to hit full capacity in 2-3 years, COO says
Infineon COO Alexander Gorski told DIGITIMES in an exclusive interview at SEMICON Taiwan 2026 that the company's new Dresden fab is ramping at twice the pace of prior expansions, boosted by AI tools and a single virtual fab strategy. He said the facility could reach full capacity in two to three years as demand from the market and from AI takes off.
Monday 7 September 2026
India frames its chip build-out as redundancy for the world, and Taiwan as its partner in building it
India's most senior semiconductor policymakers came to Taipei with an argument aimed squarely at the Taiwanese supply chain: the country's chip program is meant to add redundancy to an over-concentrated global industry, not to substitute imports behind a wall. For Taiwanese materials, gas, equipment and packaging firms, that reframes India from a distant end market into a second production base their own customers are already asking them to staff.
Monday 7 September 2026
SEMICON Taiwan 2027 moves to August, aligning with TSMC's 40th anniversary
SEMICON Taiwan, one of Taiwan's key semiconductor industry events, will move its 2027 edition forward by nearly a month to August 18-20, departing from its traditional early-to-mid-September schedule. The rapidly expanding exhibition, whose agenda increasingly centers on TSMC's strategy and technology roadmap, has grown substantially in recent years, but the new timing has raised concerns among some international supply-chain companies over summer holidays, Taiwan's heat, and peak typhoon season.
Monday 7 September 2026
Yaho rides TSMC, Micron expansion wave to tap facility integration, equipment installation market
Artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) are driving the global semiconductor industry into a new expansion cycle, with fabs extending from Taiwan to the US, Japan, Singapore, and Europe. Demand is rising for facility engineering services, including hookup and equipment installation, and semiconductor engineering services provider Yaho System Technology (Yaho) is moving fast to capture this market.
Monday 7 September 2026
Exclusive: Infineon COO says chip shortage recovery will take longer
Infineon COO Alexander Gorski told DIGITIMES in an exclusive interview at Semicon Taiwan 2026 that the current global chip shortage is unlike the one during Covid-19 and will take longer to resolve. He also discussed progress on Infineon's new Dresden plant, in-house manufacturing, outsourcing, and the company's global footprint.
Monday 7 September 2026
DeepSeek plans to buy 160,000 Huawei chips as China aims to wean itself off Nvidia
DeepSeek is reportedly planning to purchase 160,000 Huawei chips for its large 1 GW data center currently under construction in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. This would make it among the largest clusters of Huawei chips deployed to date, as the Chinese authorities attempt to wean the country off Nvidia chips, but still struggle with insufficient domestic manufacturing capacity.
Monday 7 September 2026
Analysis: Under tariff threats, Taiwan chipmakers hedge beyond US
Taiwanese companies are only at the start of a broader overseas investment cycle, as Washington signals possible new semiconductor tariffs and Taipei moves to deepen industrial links with Europe, Japan, and ASEAN. Officials say the island's chipmakers are responding to pressure from the US, while also broadening their global strategy to reduce risk and strengthen supply chains.
Monday 7 September 2026
Naura 3D DRAM etching breakthrough could give CXMT a new path beyond EUV
China's Naura Technology has demonstrated a selective etching process for 64-layer 3D DRAM structures, potentially giving domestic memory makers another route to raise transistor density while access to advanced EUV lithography remains restricted.
Monday 7 September 2026
JM-Applied sees gas equipment demand surge on AI expansion, order book exceeds NT$3 billion
JM-Applied, a Taiwanese semiconductor gas equipment manufacturer and supply chain member for Micron and TSMC, said on September 4 that revenue in the first half of 2026 exceeded NT$600 million (approx. US$18.98 million), up more than 50% year-over-year. Growth was driven by the continued demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC), which is driving global semiconductor expansion and boosting demand for gas supply systems and equipment at wafer fabs.
Monday 7 September 2026
India says it cannot build electronics without China and has started easing the rules to prove it
India is selling its semiconductor build-out abroad as a hedge against an over-concentrated supply chain. The officials running it are unusually candid that the hedge cannot be built without the country it hedges against. Asked at a media briefing in Taipei on 4 September how New Delhi views the role of Chinese companies in India's chip and electronics supply chain, S. Krishnan, secretary of India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, opened with a line that would be politically awkward in most capitals: "We need to be realistic."
Monday 7 September 2026
Weekly news roundup: AI memory race heats up, Taiwan manufacturing rebounds, Nexperia rift deepens
AI infrastructure and semiconductor supply chains led reader interest this week, from Taiwan's manufacturing recovery and Nexperia's legal battle to Sandisk's HBF, Micron's HBM expansion, and Marvell's silicon photonics roadmap. Samsung also refreshed its smartphone lineup with the Galaxy S26 FE. Below are the most-read DIGITIMES stories from the week of August 31-September 06, 2026.
Monday 7 September 2026
Orphans of the liquid cooling age: xMEMS targets data center 'hot spots,' eyes 2027 smartphone and smartglasses cooling ports
As the world's most powerful enterprise data centers undergo a massive migration to liquid cooling to support high-power artificial intelligence processors, a Silicon Valley chipmaker is warning of a growing class of "thermal orphans"—localized, low-power components that are left out in the cold.
Monday 7 September 2026
China's JCET seeks US$968M for AI-driven packaging expansion

JCET Group is preparing a CNY6.5 billion (approx. US$968 million) private share placement to expand advanced packaging and testing capacity across high-performance computing (HPC), power modules, wafer-level packaging and memory, sharpening its exposure to AI infrastructure and China's domestic semiconductor supply chain.

Monday 7 September 2026
No foundry price relief before 2027 as utilization nears 90%

AI demand is driving a broader repricing cycle across the foundry industry in 2026. Tightness that began at leading-edge nodes is spreading into mature and specialty processes, lifting wafer prices, utilization and downstream chip costs.

Monday 7 September 2026
Experts say subsidies can't buy semiconductor competitiveness
At a forum jointly hosted by DSET and SEMI during SEMICON Taiwan this year, Glenn D. Tiffert of the Hoover Institution, Kioxia Holdings board member Emiko Higashi, and NRC reporter Marc Hijink offered views on national semiconductor policy from the perspectives of the US policy community, corporate boardrooms, and Europe's industrial front line.
Monday 7 September 2026
AI is driving force behind 'Moore's Law on steroids,' says Merck's Benjamin Hein
AI is driving a new wave of technological demand and changing how the semiconductor industry innovates, according to Benjamin Hein, member of the executive board and CEO of the Electronics Business Sector at Merck. As AI becomes an integral part of semiconductor innovation, future competitive advantages in the industry will depend less on any single process or material, but rather on the ability to combine materials, processes, packaging, metrology, and software into complete processes. In this sense, AI-driven growth in the semiconductor industry is like "Moore's Law on steroids," and collaboration will become the industry's next Moore's Law.
Monday 7 September 2026
India roundup: India expands chip ambitions with full Semicon 2.0 notification

India's technology sector is gaining momentum across semiconductors, connectivity, AI payments, PCs, tablets and refurbished smartphones, as policy support and local manufacturing attract investment. However, supply-chain diversification, margin pressure, cautious demand and VinFast's manufacturing pause highlight challenges facing India's broader technology ambitions.

Sunday 6 September 2026
BenQ Materials targets CPO in semiconductor push
BenQ Materials Group has formally positioned semiconductor materials as a key future growth driver, using its existing coating, membrane, foaming, and adhesive technologies to move into wafer manufacturing, back-end packaging, and co-packaged optics (CPO). With chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) cleaning brush rollers and wafer dicing tape already shipping, the group views 2026 as a new starting point for its semiconductor business, with more visible growth expected from 2027.
Sunday 6 September 2026
TEL sees AI-driven packaging, memory demand reshaping Taiwan strategy
Tokyo Electron's Taiwan president said AI is pushing semiconductor demand into new areas, with advanced packaging, DRAM, high-bandwidth memory, and NAND flash all gaining momentum. He said Taiwan remains central to the industry's supply chain, and TEL plans to deepen local technology, service, and research ties.
Sunday 6 September 2026
Hanmi's 2.5D bonders pass Taiwan foundry qualification as packaging outsourcing expands
South Korea's Hanmi Semiconductor has reportedly begun supplying 2.5D packaging bonders to an unnamed Taiwanese foundry after the equipment passed mass-production qualification, giving the company an important production foothold as Taiwan's advanced-packaging supply chain expands beyond foundry-owned lines.
Sunday 6 September 2026
Tongtai doubles semiconductor orders on AI data-center demand
Facing rapid demand expansion across the semiconductor and AI industries, Tongtai Group (TT Group) has aggressively promoted an import-substitution and localization strategy in recent years. The group is extending its traditional machine tool expertise into hard and brittle material processing, advanced packaging, and smart manufacturing production-line solutions required for semiconductor fabrication.
Sunday 6 September 2026
Podcast highlights: SoIC vs CoWoS, HBM5 hybrid bonding, and EMIB-T's yield problem
In a podcast, DIGITIMES analyst Luke Lin said hybrid bonding is drawing fresh attention at SEMICON Taiwan 2026 and could become a key driver of advanced packaging capacity expansion in 2027 to 2028.