Scientists of the AM2SoftMag project developed an iron-based metallic alloy for laser 3D printing (LPBF) that retains an amorphous structure. The material, free of phosphorus, cobalt, and rare earth elements, has coercivity of 44–77 A/m and a critical thickness of about 1 mm.
At SEMICON Taiwan 2026 Samsung presented a shift from 2.5D to 3D memory integration via vertically stacked zHBM. The goal is to raise AI response throughput from about 100 to 1000 tokens per second per user.
China's largest DRAM maker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is emerging from the memory shortage with sharply higher profit and greater pricing power. This gives the company resources to expand into LPDDR6 and high-speed HBM memory.
TSMC is reconsidering its plan to donate 12-inch equipment as Taiwan authorities change the framework of a joint semiconductor project, and the National Science and Technology Council has not yet approved the 2027 budget.
Chinese manufacturers held about 55% of China's industrial robot market by 2025, up from under 30% in 2020, per MIR DATABANK. Estun shipped about 33,400 robots (10% share) to lead by volume, while Inovance took about 9.2%. Fanuc, ABB, Yaskawa and Kuka remain strong in premium auto and semiconductor segments.
Chinese 3D printer manufacturer Eplus3D and Young-Will Aerospace have validated crack-free laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) of copper-nickel alloy parts. Tensile strength reached 570 MPa, 18% higher than conventional forging. Validation was performed on the EP-M400 system with a 400×400×450 mm chamber and up to six lasers.
Growing sizes of packages, interposers and panels increase warpage due to differences in thermal expansion coefficients of materials. Commercial negative thermal expansion (NTE) materials are beginning to be used in chip packaging to compensate for expansion, but their mass adoption depends on temperature range, compatibility and mixture purity.
Engineers at Lam Semiverse Solutions using SEMulator3D showed that mechanical stress in GAA nanosheet channels is distributed unevenly. The difference reaches 400–800 MPa in nFET versus less than 200 MPa in pFET, with top channel thickness as the key factor.
Rosatom has agreed with Petrovietnam to create an additive technology center in Vietnam and began local production of Smart Scan scanners in India. Previously, the company sold its first RusBeam 2800 electron beam 3D printer to India and agreed on joint equipment production with HMT Limited.
Fujitsu will start selling its data center Arm processor Monaka and servers based on it in November. The chip uses Broadcom 3D packaging, Armv9, and contains four 2nm compute dies with 36 cores each, four 5nm SRAM chiplets, and a central I/O die with 12 DDR5 channels and PCIe 6.0.
Taiwanese chip testing and packaging companies, including Ardentec and Sigurd, are adopting testing of transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs) for silicon photonics amid growing demand from data centers. A US client has already booked capacity.
Japanese autonomous driving developer Tier IV is creating an AI chip for self-driving and will open-source its design and toolchain. Semiconductor manufacturers will be able to use them to produce their own chips, challenging Nvidia's position.
At Huawei Connect 2026, Huawei introduced the OceanStor M900, a petabyte-scale KV cache storage system for AI agents and long-context inference. The solution extends the company's AI infrastructure strategy into memory and storage.
Huawei announced two AI chips: 960DT in Q1 2027 and Ascend 960PR in Q3. The company is developing UnifiedBus technology to link chips into superclusters of up to 1 million processors and has already shipped over 1,000 supernodes to more than 370 customers.
Antevia Networks demonstrated simultaneous operation of a public carrier network and private 5G over a single radio infrastructure. Two devices connected to different cores via Ontix's Nexus MOCN gateway in the n77 band.
Hanwha Aerospace revealed a roadmap for ground vehicle robotization: deliveries of the multipurpose unmanned Arion-SMET will begin in 2027, and by 2030 the company plans six UGV types. K9, Chunmoo, and KAAV will get optional unmanned capability by 2029.
Huawei announced an AI cluster that links up to 4,000 chips in an attempt to build large AI systems despite US restrictions on semiconductor supplies.
Samsung Electronics is ramping up semiconductor IP and SRAM development amid memory shortages and rising prices. Accelerated AI chip refresh cycles are pushing customers to demand more competitive process nodes and faster development.
At Connect 2026, Huawei announced the Ascend 960 supernode built around near-packaged optics (NPO). The company is betting on scaling AI computing beyond the capabilities of individual accelerators.
China is expanding its advanced chip packaging base: about 20 local OSAT companies are ramping up capacity as restrictions on advanced process equipment complicate further scaling. Advanced packaging becomes a workaround to boost chip performance without EUV access.
Three of China's largest LCD panel makers sent clients written notices of price increases for the first time, as Taiwanese panel makers sell their plants and China strengthens its position in the global market.
At FIT Tech Day 2026 on September 16, Foxconn Interconnect Technology chairman Sidney Lu said the AI industry's focus is shifting from computing power growth to better connections. FIT is expanding its optical interconnect efforts.
According to Taiwanese outlet TaiSounds, MediaTek's flagship Dimensity 9600 Pro chip costs up to $220 — a record for the company (Dimensity 9500 — $180–200). The competing Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro is estimated at about $300, Apple's A20 Pro at about $280. The chip is built on TSMC's 2nm process and contains over 33 billion transistors.
According to the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association, the memory gap between China and Korea has narrowed to ~3 years for HBM, ~2 years for DRAM, and ~1 year for NAND. CXMT has entered mass production of LPDDR6, but its HBM3 yield remains around 25% due to TSV and multi-layer packaging issues. For DRAM stacking, the company plans to use YMTC's Cu-Cu hybrid bonding XStacking technology.
Google plans to release the TPU Humufish by the end of 2027 using advanced Intel EMIB-T packaging with MediaTek's support, but due to low substrate yields it is considering a backup option: TSMC's CoWoS packaging.
The Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) reported progress in developing a 3nm GAA process on DUV equipment without using EUV. Technical lead of the national 02 Special project Tianchun Ye presented the route at the IC WORLD conference.
Foreign companies, mainly suppliers of chip manufacturing equipment and materials, are announcing investments in India ahead of SEMICON India 2026. Commitments are shifting deeper into the supply chain—from assembly to equipment and materials.
Hyosung Heavy Industries was selected for KEPCO's project to localize and test high-voltage HVDC systems, responsible for valves and controllers. At a Busan exhibition, the company showcased converter valves, LPIT, STATCOM, SST, and a hydrogen generator.
Singular Photonics released the Litavis CMOS SPAD sensor with integrated digital processing of photon events on-chip and in-pixel. It delivers 47% photon detection efficiency at 785 nm, 37 ps timing resolution and 4.3 ns dead time; availability dates were not given.
According to Silicon Data, the residual value of Nvidia B200 GPUs is 158% of their original launch price—58% above launch—about a year after mass shipments. The reason is shortage and high demand for inference workloads.
