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.

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.

Component suppliers, including cable specialist Copartner Tech, connector maker Speed Tech, and Primax Electronics, which supplies components for mainly mobile devices and PC peripherals, have all moved to grow the proportion of sales generated from non-CE sectors, such as automotive, industrial, and medical.