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Monday 7 September 2026
HBM4 squeezes DRAM supply as Samsung, SK Hynix inventories fall below 10 days
Memory inventories at Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have fallen below 10 days of supply as AI infrastructure spending drives simultaneous demand for HBM, server DRAM and enterprise SSDs, according to a Sept. 7 report from KB Securities.
Monday 7 September 2026
Phison snaps up low-cost China NAND inventory, AI revenue share set to top 40%
Phison CEO K.S. Pua expects NAND Flash supply to remain tight into 2027 despite capacity expansion across major memory makers, arguing that forecasts of a rapid return to oversupply are "too naive."
Monday 7 September 2026
Micron scores seventh PTAB win in YMTC patent fight
Micron Technology has scored a seventh favorable Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) outcome in its wide-ranging patent fight with China's Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), while a separate set of challenges is moving through the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) reexamination process.
Monday 7 September 2026
SK Hynix 1c DRAM production share to reach 34% by year-end ahead of HBM4E
SK Hynix is accelerating its shift to sixth-generation 10nm-class 1c DRAM, with the process expected to account for roughly 34% of its DRAM production by the fourth quarter as the company prepares for HBM4E and seeks greater cost efficiency.
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
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.
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.
Sunday 6 September 2026
Trumpf CTO says advanced packaging reshapes semiconductor equipment race
AI and high-performance computing (HPC) demand is changing the semiconductor industry's technology and investment priorities. As chip power consumption, computing density, and data transfer requirements rise rapidly, competition is no longer limited to front-end process scaling; 3D stacking, advanced packaging, high-density interconnects, thermal management, and memory technologies are also becoming more important.
Saturday 5 September 2026
Micron looks to lock in Taiwanese construction capacity with long-term deals
The global rush to build semiconductor fabs is creating a historic opportunity for Taiwan's construction and facility engineering supply chain, and Micron Technology is looking to move away from awarding work project by project in favor of long-term agreements and reserved capacity with a small group of trusted partners.
Saturday 5 September 2026
Commentary: China builds three-pronged memory strategy around CXMT, YMTC, XMC
China's memory industry is shifting from a single-champion model towards a three-pronged structure. ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is building its position in DRAM, Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) in 3D NAND, while Wuhan Xinxin Semiconductor Manufacturing (XMC) is concentrating its next phase on NOR Flash, 3D integration and optoelectronics.
Friday 4 September 2026
TSMC urges HBM makers to design for X-ray inspection as packaging grows more complex
TSMC is calling for future HBM and DRAM designs to become more compatible with X-ray inspection, as increasingly complex advanced packaging makes buried defects harder to detect while raising concerns over radiation exposure to sensitive memory devices.
Friday 4 September 2026
SEMICON Taiwan 2026: QuantumDiamonds cracks the hybrid bonding blind spot with new inline metrology
The global semiconductor industry is hitting a physical wall. As artificial intelligence demands push architectures toward three-dimensional packaging, high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacks, and complex hybrid bonding, traditional inspection tools are going blind.
Friday 4 September 2026
China interconnect chipmaker Montage enters Samsung, SK Hynix CXL 3.2 supply chains and begins DDR6 development

Montage Technology is accelerating its move beyond traditional DDR memory interfaces, with CXL 3.2, DDR6 and PCIe products positioning the Chinese interconnect chipmaker deeper in AI data center infrastructure.

Friday 4 September 2026
Micron reportedly targets 2× HBM capacity by end-2026; Samsung, SK Hynix keep the scale edge
Micron is reportedly preparing to roughly double its high-bandwidth memory capacity by the end of 2026, targeting about 100,000 wafers a month while sharply increasing 12-high HBM4 output for Nvidia's Vera Rubin AI platform.
Friday 4 September 2026
Processor, memory boom could push chip supply chain out of sync, says Yole
Gary Huang, vice president and head of Asia-Pacific research and business development at Yole Group, said the imbalance is already showing signs of what he described as supply-chain "decoupling."
Friday 4 September 2026
AI boom reshapes DRAM market as Samsung regains lead and CXMT gains ground

The global DRAM market continued its explosive expansion in the second quarter of 2026, as AI infrastructure spending drove demand for both conventional memory and high-bandwidth memory (HBM), while Chinese supplier ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) rapidly increased its presence.

Friday 4 September 2026
Kioxia pitches flash as a DRAM substitute as Micron, YMTC close in
Kioxia's plan to push NAND flash into work that DRAM currently does is less a product launch than an answer to a structural problem. Alone among the leading memory makers, it does not produce DRAM, and in the one market where it does compete, it is being squeezed from both above and below — by a resurgent Micron and by China's Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), which has closed much of the gap in a single year.
Friday 4 September 2026
Nanya, ESMT hit record August revenue on higher contract prices
Memory chip makers continue to post sequential revenue gains, with Nanya Technology and Elite Semiconductor Microelectronics Technology (ESMT) both reporting record consolidated revenue for August 2026. Nanya's revenue rose 1.88% month-over-month, while ESMT's climbed 16.51%, as higher contract prices in the third quarter drove strong revenue growth.
Thursday 3 September 2026
SanDisk pushes HBF ecosystem as AI inference reshapes token economics
The rapid rise of AI inference, multimodal inputs, and AI agents is giving NAND flash a new strategic role.
Thursday 3 September 2026
CXMT expands global hiring to Japan for DDR5, LPDDR technology upgrade

Chinese DRAM maker CXMT has launched its 2027 global recruitment campaign, opening roles across circuit design, R&D, mass-production technology, manufacturing operations, information technology and artificial intelligence. Positions are based in Hefei, Beijing, Shanghai, Xi'an and overseas markets including Japan.

Thursday 3 September 2026
SK Hynix weighs Kioxia production tie-up in Japan
SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won has raised the possibility of jointly producing semiconductors with Japan's Kioxia, taking SK Hynix's exploration of a Japanese manufacturing base a step further by publicly identifying its NAND rival as a potential production partner.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Intel pre-funds EMIB-T and CPU capacity, will address DRAM through partners rather than fabs
Intel's US$23 billion equity raise in August was pre-funding for a capacity build driven by demand and process confidence rather than distress, chief financial officer David Zinsner said, committing Intel to equipping fabs in Ireland, Arizona, and Oregon before 14A reaches high-volume manufacturing in 2028. At Deutsche Bank's 2026 Technology Conference on August 27, he put numbers on the advanced packaging business, a data center CPU cycle Intel expects to undersupply into 2028, and a gross margin now "comfortably in the 40s."
Thursday 3 September 2026
Apple, Xiaomi and Nvidia chase terabyte-class bandwidth for AI chips
For decades, semiconductor performance gains largely came from shrinking process nodes, from 22nm and 14nm to 7nm and 3nm. AI is changing the constraint: processors are getting faster, but moving enough data to feed them is increasingly difficult.
Thursday 3 September 2026
CXMT's 'Hefei Project' exposed in Samsung DRAM theft case
South Korean prosecutors allege that Chinese memory maker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) set up an internal "Hefei Project" in 2016 to obtain Samsung Electronics' core DRAM technology and recruit its engineers, with phased goals laid out in advance.
Thursday 3 September 2026
Samsung to add 1,612 new equipment units at Vietnam chip plant
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.