Short updates from the semiconductor industry, with context and links to the relevant chapters. RSS
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October 30, 2026 Industry & People
HBM and DRAM supply remains tight across the industry, while advanced packaging capacity is being pushed harder by AI demand. At the same time, foundries, equipment makers and AI infrastructure suppliers are expanding investments, pricing, and partnerships to keep pace with next-generation compute and memory ramps.
October 29, 2026 Industry & People
AI systems can still stall even with tens of thousands of GPUs when data movement becomes the bottleneck. Silicon photonics and co-packaged optics (CPO) are emerging as ways to move more of that traffic from electrical links to light, reducing loss, power consumption, and heat in large-scale AI networks.
October 22, 2026 Industry & People
Advanced packaging is pushing foundries and OSATs into each other’s territory. The overlap is strongest in 2.5D integration and panel-level assembly, where lithography-like materials, finer RDL features, and new equipment are moving into packaging lines. Hybrid bonding remains mostly a foundry activity for now, but it is already being positioned as a future spillover area as capacity tightens.
October 20, 2026 Industry & People
Singapore is tying together chip research, startups, and manufacturing with platforms for SiC power devices, metalenses, and silicon photonics. A*STAR, MetaOptics, Advanced Micro Foundry, and GlobalFoundries illustrate how deep-tech work can move from laboratory development into industrial-scale production.
October 20, 2026 Industry & People
Artificial intelligence is shifting the semiconductor bottleneck from individual devices to the full computing system. Applied Materials says future progress will depend on tighter coordination across processors, memory, interconnects, advanced packaging, power efficiency and thermal management, with earlier collaboration needed to avoid late-stage integration problems.
October 16, 2026 Industry & People
SEMICON West 2026 in San Francisco framed semiconductors as a trillion-dollar industry and put AI at the center of the next fab buildout. The show highlighted new inspection tools from ZEISS, panel-level packaging deposition from Von Ardenne, motion-control equipment from Heidenhain, materials work from Mitsubishi Chemical Group, and workforce programs led by ABM.
October 16, 2026 Industry & People
At iTechCon 2026, industry and research speakers argued that AI value is shifting from standalone chips toward co-design across hardware, models, software, packaging, and system architecture. The discussion highlighted Taiwan’s strengths in semiconductor manufacturing and advanced packaging, but also its need to deepen software capability, cross-disciplinary talent, and startup support as AI moves into inference, agentic AI, edge devices, and physical AI.
October 16, 2026 Industry & People
A dense week in semiconductors brought fresh fab expansion, new packaging and test initiatives, stronger AI-related spending signals, and continued momentum in China’s memory and EUV efforts. TSMC and ASML both reported strong quarters, while startups in photonics and 3D compute secured new funding and quantum hardware teams posted notable technical progress.
October 14, 2026 Industry & People
At Ayar Labs’ CPO Summit, Meta, Broadcom, AMD, MediaTek, Lumentum, Wiwynn and Upscale AI focused on whether the optical interconnect ecosystem can be ready for a 2028 demand surge. The discussions centered on manufacturability, supply-chain scale, interoperability and the OCI MSA as co-packaged optics moves toward high-volume deployment.
October 14, 2026 Industry & People
ASM International is highlighting how the move toward more complex 3D devices is shifting attention beyond lithography and onto the materials and process steps needed to build them reliably.
October 8, 2026 Industry & People
Test vendors are adapting their production tools for near-packaged and co-packaged optics as data center deployments move toward higher volume. The main pressure points are optical alignment, connector uncertainty, thermal load, and the lack of optical design-for-testability in today’s flows.
October 6, 2026 Industry & People
South Korean memory makers are reportedly quoting much higher long-term contract prices for sixth-generation high-bandwidth memory. HBM4 is expected to sell for about US$500 to US$550 in 2026, while 2027 quotes could reach US$1,400 to US$1,600, reflecting a 1.8x to 1.9x increase.
September 30, 2026 Industry & People
HBM is becoming a major cost driver in GPU-based CoWoS packaging, raising the question of whether memory can still be treated as a passive part of AI computing. The discussion ties back to the long-running memory wall that has influenced semiconductor development for decades.
September 30, 2026 Industry & People
Global Foundry 2.0 market revenue climbed to a record $96.6 billion in the second quarter of 2026, driven by data-center expansion and stronger demand across networking, power management, mature-node chips, packaging, and test.
September 30, 2026 Industry & People
At A*STAR’s Innovate Together 2026, industry specialists discussed how AI is reshaping packaging requirements, from hybrid bonding and optical interconnects to tighter process control.