I have observed that in the development process of smart IoT (Internet of Things), most companies want to sell expensive IoT and big data solutions to customers, which is like putting the cart before the horse and can hardly succeed.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) on June 13 revealed its most-advanced GPU for artificial intelligence (AI), the MI300X, trying to get a bigger bite of the pie of the GPU market that has been dominated by Nvidia.

Although Apple's US$3,499 Vision Pro headset received worldwide media attention at the WWDC 2023 last week, there are already companies waiting to take a big bite out of the Vision Pro sales through trademark lawsuits.

Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled its first mixed reality headset VisionPro at the WWDC 2023 keynote on June 5, attracting attention and cheering from Apple fans worldwide. There are some interesting facts behind this year's WWDC which may have escaped the most discerning eyes, especially the marvels to be performed with new features enabled by the chips used in the gadgets.

After months of negotiations, Taiwan and the U.S. signed the first agreement under the U.S.-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade on June 1 in Washington D.C. It outlines practices and procedures aimed at streamlining and strengthening trade relations. Both sides of negotiators deserve a round of accolades, but the fact that it does not cover tariff reductions or exemptions still puts many stakeholders down.

ChatGPT has swept across the world with roaring momentum, accumulating a million users in just five days. For comparison, Facebook and Netflix took 10 months and 41 months respectively to reach their first million users. Compared to predecessor platforms like IG, Facebook, Spotify, and Airbnb, ChatGPT's growth speed was staggering.

News about significant improvements in yields and capacity on Samsung's 4nm process and the subsequent win in getting orders from AMD and Google raised some eyebrows among its competitors. How did Samsung make such a huge leap in such a short time? One cannot rule out the possibility that artificial intelligence (AI) may be the answer.

Chinese smartphone maker Oppo disbanded its chip design house Zeku in May, stimulating commentary on Zeku being the latest victim of the US-China chip war among the media in China. However, blaming geopolitical pressure for Zeku's failure does not help stakeholders to prevent the same mistake from recurring. Zeku's CEO Liu Jun and Oppo founder Duan Yongping made it clear: with sales far lower than expected, the investment needed for self-designed chips went through of the roof and it became prohibitively difficult to sustain the operation, thus they chose to correct the mistake sooner rather than later.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), the leading chip foundry company in China, is missing out on the opportunity brought by chiplet technologies, as Beijing Municipal Government specifically named chiplet technology as the primary investment target for achieving advanced chip manufacturing technology breakthroughs.

Google Trends is a useful tool to observe how trends are changing for specific topics. This time, I entered the three phrases that represent paradigm shifts in AI technology: "Expert System," "Deep Learning," and "Generative AI" to observe the results.

The Taiwanese government has announced its policy to promote Taiwan as a center for high-end manufacturing and advanced semiconductor processes in Asia. However, key materials, equipment, and technology are still dominated by foreign companies from Japan, the Netherlands, and the U.S. This includes military and aerospace technology, which is vital for national defense, but Taiwan still has limited access to it.

The US defense industry is attempting to regear itself in preparation for potential large-scale military conflicts, waking up from a post-Cold War investment hiatus during which counterinsurgency missions topped the Pentagon's agenda. Simmering tension in the Taiwan Strait and evolution in defense technology is also testing Washington's ability to bolster supply chain resilience while reinforcing military resilience in the Indo-Pacific region. Against this backdrop, we will see how the US seeks to strike a delicate balance between re-shoring and ally-shoring.

Compared to other industry sectors, IC design has been more impacted by low birth rates and a lack of local IT manpower. In India, there are 56,000 IC design engineers; in the US, there are 86,000; in China, there are 121,000; and in Taiwan there are 47,000. In fact, India doesn't really have an IC design industry of its own. All IC design engineers work for foreign companies in one way or another. Qualcomm, Intel, Samsung, MediaTek, and Toshiba all run big R&D teams in India. Local semiconductor firms, such as MindTree, don't design products they sell directly to the market; rather they outsource service partners working for foreign companies.

A recent DIGITIMES Research report shows that China has more IC design companies with revenue exceeding $100 million than Taiwan. While the difference in the number of papers presented at ISSCC between the two sides was not significant until 2020, Chinese companies have now surged ahead, indicating China's growing strength.