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.

If this is the case, it would be the first time that Apple has not retained the previous year's model to allow for a wide range of iPhones available at many price points.

Beijing-based Naura Microelectronics Equipment has completed a deal to buy US semiconductor manufacturing equipment company Akrion Systems.

Two China-based fabless companies made the top 10 ranking last year-HiSilicon, which sells most of its devices as internal transfers to smartphone supplier Huawei, and Unigroup, which includes the IC sales of both Spreadtrum and RDA.

In an interview with Reuters, Trump and his economic adviser Gary Cohn said China had forced US companies to transfer their intellectual property to China as a cost of doing business there.

Built on 10nm process technology, the new GDDR6 memory comes in a 16Gb density, which doubles that of the company's 20nm 8Gb GDDR5 memory.

China will have capacity in place to run 700,000 300mm wafers a month by the end of this year, according to TrendForce.

The Dutch maker of lithography systems said on Wednesday its outlook for 2018 had been bolstered by a growing backlog of orders. Its products play a decisive role in shrinking the size of chips so as to cram ever more circuits onto them.

Outside of Samsung's Galaxy, the only other Exynos customer is Meizu.

Price increases for both DRAM and NAND flash memory are raising the outlook for the overall semiconductor market.

The acquisition has now received 8 of the 9 approvals around the world, with China remaining.

Alphabet Inc's Google has agreed to a patent licensing deal with Tencent Holdings Ltd as it looks for ways to expand in China where many of its products, such as app store, search engine and email service, are blocked by regulators.

Christopher Rolland of Susquehanna today writes that chip makers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) probably had much better sales of graphics chips, or GPUs, than the companies predicted, last quarter, driven by their use in mining the Ethereum blockchain.

Intel says devices are rebooting more than usual after being patched with fixes it has issued to the Spectre and Meltdown security flaws in its chips. The company said it had reproduced the problem and was "making progress toward identifying the root cause".

Apple has announced that it will be contributing US$350 billion into the US economy over the next five years, combining both new investments and its existing spending with domestic companies for supply and manufacturing.

A new "text bomb" affecting Apple's iPhone and Mac computers has been discovered. A software developer tweeted about the flaw which typically causes an iPhone to crash and in some cases restart.

Users ofGoogle Home and Chromecast may experience trouble connecting online through their home Wi-Fi, according to new reports.

A month after announcing plans to open its first AI lab in China, Google is expanding again through a move into Shenzhen. The U.S. tech giant has opened an office in the Chinese city, which borders Hong Kong and known for being a global hardware hub, according to an internal email obtained by TechCrunch. This isn't a fully-blown Google campus, instead the company has taken up space within a serviced office starting this week.

A Democratic U.S. lawmaker asked Intel and two other microchip makers on Tuesday to provide a briefing on the recently detected Spectre and Meltdown security flaws that could allow hackers to steal information from most computers and devices.

When Intel and AMD announced they'd be cooperating on a new CPU with an Intel processor paired with an AMD GPU, it was easy to see who the loser was going to be. Nvidia has a dominant overall position in the GPU market, including the types of all-in-one and small form factor systems that might opt for one of Intel's new CPUs with Radeon RX Vega graphics rather than an Intel CPU with Nvidia GPU. Now, there's hints that Nvidia is planning to respond with a new GPU iteration of its own: The GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q.

Veeco Instruments has announced that Osram Opto Semiconductors has ordered a multi-reactor Propel High Volume Manufacturing (HVM) Gallium Nitride (GaN) Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD) System.

Sure, we all know what famous person we vaguely look like (I always get Geena Davis, which ... I wish! She's still in a "League of Her Own.") But the blandly named Google Arts & Culture app will dig through thousands of museum artworks from days gone by to see if you have a truly old-school doppelganger.

While investors pressure Apple to address youth phone addiction, experts are more optimistic about the voice-enabled smart speakers that Google and Amazon want to plunk into your living room

We're getting a slightly clearer picture of the performance hits on PCs from the Spectre/Meltdown vulnerability patches.

Japanese giant Softbank is planning to list its mobile phone business in Tokyo and overseas, according to the Nikkei newspaper. Softbank confirmed in a statement that the share sale is an option but no decision has yet been made.