Semiconductor News & Analysis Feed

Fabless chip designers dominate the upper ranks of Taiwan's newly disclosed non-managerial employee pay data for fiscal year 2025, with only two capital-intensive manufacturers — TSMC and memory-testing equipment maker Phison — breaking into the top tier typically reserved for asset-light IC design houses.

Taiwanese power management IC (PMIC) design houses have been expanding into new applications and broadening their product portfolios in recent years, aiming to move beyond consumer electronics into higher-spec, more stable markets as the AI boom accelerates.

Researchers from ETH Zurich, lowRISC, and University of Bologna published a technical paper titled “Croc: Training the Next Generation Chip Designers on Domain-Specific End-to-End Open Source Silicon.” This paper describes Croc, an open-source, customizable RISC-V SoC platform and teaching flow that lets students take domain-specific chip-design projects from architecture and RTL through physical

Taiwan's memory chip designers are heading into a sharply stronger 2026 as rising memory prices and a wave of AI-driven demand push the industry away from consumer electronics and toward higher-value data center and AI applications.

Samsung Electronics' foundry division plans to open its Multi-Project Wafer, or MPW, service to its 2nm process next year, giving South Korean fabless chip designers access to one of the most advanced foundry nodes being commercialized without having to pay for a full wafer run, according to ZDNet Koreaand iNews24.

The world's largest chip designers are steadily growing more bullish on the future of cloud artificial intelligence (AI) chips known as ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) — a market increasingly seen as the next major battleground in the global AI boom.