Ampere, a new chip company run by former Intel president Renee James, came out of stealth today with a brand-new highly efficient Arm-based server chip targeted at hyperscale data centers.

Samsung Electronics is launching a new chip for cars, tentatively called Exynos Auto, with aims to supply the chip first to Audi that has used chips mostly from Qualcomm, industry sources said on Feb. 5.

Broadcom plans to unveil a new approximately $120 billion offer for Qualcomm on Monday, aiming to ratchet up pressure on its US semiconductor peer to engage in negotiations, people familiar with the matter said on Sunday.

Walkie-talkie maker Motorola Solutions said on Thursday it would buy Canadian security camera maker Avigilon for C$1.2 billion ($978 million) cash.

Samsung Electronics is expected to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), a macroeconomic management agency under China's State Council, this week.

For several years, Apple has been steadily designing more and more of the chips powering its iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple Watches.

Samsung Electronics will differentiate itself from rivals in the saturated mobile market with the launch of a foldable OLED phone this year, the South Korean tech giant has said.

Ericsson reported larger than expected losses for the fourth quarter on Wednesday and said it expected the Chinese market to continue to decline, dampening hopes of any short-term rebound for the struggling mobile equipment maker.

Sharp swung to a JPY55.3 billion (US$506 million) net profit for the nine months ended in December 2017, as strong sales of tablet screens drove a recovery by LCD operations. The Japanese electronics maker, a unit of Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry, or Foxconn, had logged a JPY41.1 billion net loss in the year-earlier period.

NEC will offer early retirement packages for 3,000 of the 80,000 people employed in Japan by group companies next fiscal year, as it turns to restructuring yet again to help revive stagnant earnings in a fiercely competitive market.

China will fill 15% of its semiconductor needs in 2020 and perhaps 20% in 2022. That's significant growth, but far from the targets of 40% in 2020 and 70% in 2022 that the China government has set.

The US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating whether Apple violated securities laws concerning its disclosures about a software update that slowed older iPhone models, according to people familiar with the matter.

The new products enable corporate data centers having data set sizes smaller than found in hyperscale environments to harness the power of data across a broad spectrum of Big Data applications such as analytics and distributed file systems.

Japanese chip vendor Renesas Electronics denied that it is in talks to acquire rival Maxim Integrated after reports about a possible deal sent Maxim's stock price skyrocketing.

Apple will halve its production target for the iPhone X in the three-month period from January from the figure of over 40 million units envisaged at the time of its release in November.

A plan for a billion-dollar fab in Guangzhou, China, aims to pool investments from fabless companies, creating a built-in customer base. It is the latest addition to a growing list of projects as the country tries to build up its semiconductor sector.

LG Display will supply flexible organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) to Sony. They broadened the scope of cooperation from large OLED TVs to smartphones.

Western Digital gave strong profit forecasts for the current quarter and the full year on Thursday and said the flash memory market would grow faster this year, easing investor jitters that the surging demand for memory chips was fading.

Texas Instruments on Tuesday posted the slowest revenue growth in four quarters on softer demand for its chips used in communications equipment, disappointing investors who expected sales for automotive chips to drive strong results.

Micro semi, the largest US commercial supplier of military and aerospace semiconductor equipment, is exploring its options, including a possible sale, after it received a takeover approach, a person familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.

Rumors have started popping up online suggesting that Meizu will no longer release MediaTek-powered smartphones, as the company is focusing more on Exynos and Snapdragon-powered gadgets.

Sony is also confirmed to be hosting its keynote on February 26, and chances are that the company will announce the Xperia XZ and Xperia XZ Pro flagship handsets during that press conference.

The head of China's second-biggest e-commerce company, JD.com Inc, accused the United States on Wednesday of practising "serious" protectionism against Chinese firms and said this would ultimately backfire on the world's largest economy.

The European Commision (EC), the EU's legislative and regulatory arm, said its investigation, which lasted for more than two years, concluded that Qualcomm paid Apple billions of dollars to keep it from buying LTE baseband chips from Qualcomm's rivals, violating EU antitrust rules.

In 2017, about two dozen acquisition agreements were reached for semiconductor companies, business units, product lines, and related assets with a combined value of $27.7 billion compared to the record-high $107.3 billion set in 2015 and the $99.8 billion total in 2016.

HomePod, the innovative wireless speaker from Apple, arrives in stores beginning Friday, February 9 and is available to order online this Friday, January 26 in the US, UK and Australia. HomePod will arrive in France and Germany this spring.

Google today unveiled its experimental effort to integrate augmented reality features into the mobile and desktop web using its Chrome browser. That way, web designers, media organizations, and other creative professionals could create virtual 3D objects, embed them into websites for viewing on desktop, and make them downloadable on mobile so users could place those objects into their real world surroundings.

The world is rapidly "running out of computing capacity," the head of tech giant Microsoft has warned. Satya Nadella said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that superfast quantum computers are needed to solve some of the most difficult problems.

Nearly three years after Tokyo Electron's planned merger with Applied Materials collapsed over objections from US anti-trust regulators, the Japanese company finds itself in a surprising position: healthier profit margins.

Micron has announced with Rambus, Northwest Logic and Avery Design, their efforts to deliver a comprehensive solution for GDDR6, the world's fastest discrete memory. This first-of-its-kind solution would enable GDDR6 use in advanced applications such as high-performance networking, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and 5G infrastructure.

The US has approved controversial tariffs on imported washing machines and solar panels. The move is in line with President Trump's "America First" trade policy, which aims to protect local manufacturers from foreign competition. Chinese solar panels makers and washing machine producers in South Korea will be most heavily affected.

After Imagination Technologies bought MIPS Technologies in 2013, they invested in the architecture and attempted to build a business around it as a potential ARM competitor. These plans largely failed, and Imagination Technologies arranged the sale of MIPS - and itself - to different venture capital firms in the fall of 2017. Now, the company has been brought back to Silicon Valley, where it hopes to build a new line of competitive processors for AI workloads.

The industry this year may see a microprocessor ship from startup Graphcore that uses no DRAM and one from rival Cerebras Systems that pioneers wafer-level integration. The hefty 2.5-D Nervana chip acquired by Intel is already sampling, and a dozen other processors are in the works. Meanwhile, chip companies from ARM to Western Digital are working on cores to accelerate the inference part of deep neural nets.

The South Korean chip industry is tightening its monitoring of increasing protectionist moves by China and the US as they are faced with probes and suspicions of price collision.

Toshiba is considering an IPO of its prized memory chip business if an agreed $18 billion sale to a Bain Capital-led consortium fails to gain antitrust approval by the end of March, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

SK Hynix has just made their next generation GDDR6 memory available to customers which can include graphics card manufacturers such as Nvidia and AMD.

Amazon opens its first supermarket without checkouts - human or self-service - to shoppers on Monday. Amazon Go, in Seattle, has been tested by staff for the past year. It uses an array of ceiling-mounted cameras to identify each customer and track what items they select, eliminating the need for billing.

Japan's Sumitomo Chemical has halted production of a key material used in LEDs at a joint venture with South Korea's Samsung Electronics. The two founded the 50-50 joint venture SSLM in 2011, with hopes of combining their strengths to broaden their market shares of sapphire wafers in emerging countries and elsewhere. Their ambitions were shattered by the rise of low-cost manufacturers in China.