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).

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.

IC design houses will still be trapped by high inventory levels in the fourth quarter of 2022, as replenishment demand from customers remains slow, according to industry sources.