Nexperia said on Thursday that it will spend US$700 million for next 12 to 15 months to expand its chip production capacity.The money will be spent to at its European wafer fabs, assembly factories in Asia, and global research facilities.Research will include those into gallium nitride (GaN) wide ba

AI chip firm Graphcore will start collaborating with South Korean IT service firm NHN in AI cloud service starting this month.Under their partnership, Graphcore will not only be supplying its intelligence processing unit (IPU), but the pair will be co-developing OpenStack technology, Graphcore count

High performance computing (HPC) sector is expected to lead the growth of chip fan-out packaging market this year, according to data from Yole Development.Application processors (AP) for smartphones and smartwatches accounted for the majority of the fan-out packaging market last year.Starting this y

Samsung said on Tuesday that it has begun mass production of its LPDDR5 UFS-based multichip package (uMCP).The package integrates LPDDR5 DRAM with UFS 3.1 NAND flash.The high spec is for flagship 5G smartphones, Samsung said. The LPDDR5 mobile DRAM offers 25GB/s read and write team, which is 1.5 tim

Cryo H&I said on Tuesday that it has secured 2 billion won from its Series A funding round.The company is the only one in South Korea that offers ultra low-temperature high vacuum cryopump technology used in semiconductor and display panel production.Industrial Bank of Korea and Quantum Ventures Kor

Sung Chung, the CTO of chip reliability testing firm QRT, told TheElec that semiconductors used in automobiles must have equal reliability levels to their counterparts used in satellites and in space.Automobile chips require high levels of soft error evaluation as automobile reliability is directly

Magnachip has received a takeover bid from Cornucopia Investment Partners worth US$1.66 billion, according to a report by Reuters.In March, the South Korean chip firm entered into a deal with Chinese private equity firm Wise Road Capital to sell its shares for US$1.4 billion.The South Korean governm

Chip testing firm APACT said on Monday that it plans to start a new system semiconductor backend business for new growth.The company will open a new sales office in Pangyo to start the business in full-scale, it said.APACT will place sales personnel and engineers at the new office to aggressively wi

SK Hynix’s plan to buy Intel’s NAND business unit was approved by antitrust authorities in Taiwan on Thursday.The approval follows those made in the US, Europe and South Korea.Last year in October, SK Hynix had announced that it plans to buy Intel’s NAND and solid-state drive business units for US$9

Intel was in talks to buy SiFive for US$2 billion, according to reports.The move is seen as Intel’s counter to Nvidia’s planned acquisition of Arm.Both Intel and SiFive declined to comment on the matter, according to Reuters.SiFive offers its own open source RISC-V chip core, an alternative to Arm’s

X-ray inspection company Xavis was chosen by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy to get government making to develop a chip inspection kit.Xavis will receive 3 billion won in funding up to 2024 to develop its under 25-nanometer high-resolution 3D X-ray nondestructive semiconductor inspection

DRAM and NAND flash prices are expected to increase again in the third quarter as they did in the second quarter, according to market research firm TrendForce.DRAM prices are expected to increase between 3% to 8% in the third quarter, the firm said.DRAM prices increased between 18% to 23% in the sec

Surplus Global, a South Korean pre-owned fab equipment seller, said on Wednesday that it was seeing explosive demand for equipment from the chip industry in light the global chip shortage.CEO Brian Kim told TheElec that Surplus Global’s growth this year is expected to exceed that of the average grow

Samsung on Tuesday said it has developed an 8-nanometer (nm) foundry process for RF chips.RF chip changes the digital signal from the modem chip into analog, converting them to the wireless frequency we can use.Samsung said its 8nm RF foundry makes the RF chip 35% smaller compared to the 14nm proces

SK Hynix on Tuesday denied online rumors that alleged the company suffered billions of dollars in losses due to defective DRAMs.An online post claiming the Korean memory giant suffered 2 trillion won in losses due to 240,000 DRAM wafers turning up defective recently during production spread in vario

Semiconductor packaging firm Hana Micron was in talks to buy semiconductor testing company APACT.Hana was seeking to acquire APACT to win a large, long-term order to handle semiconductor backend process work from South Korean memory giant SK Hynix, people familiar with the matter told TheElec.Those

Abov Semiconductor will be given 5.5 billion won in financial support for the next three years from the South Korean government to develop its wireless charging technology.The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said on Friday that it has selected the company as one of the fabless chip firms it s

Fab equipment sales from South Korea reached US$7.31 billion in the first quarter of 2021, according to SEMI.This was an 118% increase from the US$3.36 billion of the year prior.It was also an increase of 82% from the previous quarter’s US$4.02 billion.The surge is likely due to the increased spendi

South Korean chemical firm Miwon Commercial is likely to supply more krypton fluoride (KrF) photoresist polymer to Samsung as the latter upgrades its 3D NAND from Gen 6 to Gen 7, TheElec has learned.Samsung is preparing to start manufacturing its Gen 7 3D NAND, which has more layers than the previou

Hyundai Mobis, the component arm of Hyundai Motor Group, was in talks with South Korean fabless chip and design house companies to develop its own automobile semiconductor, TheElec has learned.The project is called ES Project internally. ES stands for Eui-sun, the first name of Hyundai Motor Group c