Today Sharp has launched in Japan the Aquos XLED EP1 series of 4K TVs with N-Black panels with HDR10, HLG, and Dolby Vision certification. They employ the brand’s active mini LED drive technology which divides the mini LED backlight into more than 1000 areas to finely control bright and dark areas. Thanks to this technology, these 4K XLED TVs deliver three times higher peak brightness than that…
Soaring silicon carbide (SiC) demand from electric vehicles (EV) is leading to a tight supply of 6-inch SiC wafers, of which the cost will unlikely go down.
As the semiconductor industry once again frets over the future of Moore’s Law, the notion of chiplets has gained traction, especially as the technology has come to be prominently featured by Intel as a key driver to its future growth, underpinning the “system foundry” promoted by Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. At the intel Innovation Forum in late September, leading foundries like TSMC and Samsung even rallied behind Intel, publicly voicing their support for the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) consortium initiated by Intel to provide an open standard for the interconnects between chiplets. Industry heavyweights including AMD, Arm, Google, TSMC and ASE have all joined the consortium.
With mature-process automotive chips still in short supply, some automakers worldwide are moving to have their chips fabricated with advanced process nodes, especially for new car models and EVs, according to industry sources.
The US government launched a new series of control of semiconductor export to China earlier in October – the move is expected to limit the country in designing and obtaining high-performance computing (HPC) chips and restrict the technologies to benefit Chinese AI and supercomputer development, preventing their use in strengthening Chinese military and conducting activities in violation of human rights.
A major blaze in South Korea that knocked out a wide range of key digital services for days – snarling banking, ride-sharing and online deliveries – is reigniting safety concerns in a nation that’s a key global supplier of lithium-ion cells used in electric vehicles (EV).
Both TSMC and Samsung Electronics are seeing their production scale for 3nm chips constrained due to difficulty in having good control of orders from big clients, and their capacity utilizations for sub-7nm process nodes are also being affected by the latest US semiconductor trade sanctions against China, according to industry sources. TSMC has moved to encourage its employees to take vacations and spend more time with families, the sources added.