Qualcomm announced on September 24 that it has renewed its global patent licensing agreement with Apple, with the new contract set to take effect on April 1, 2027. The terms and value of the deal were not disclosed, but Apple's long-running move toward in-house modem chips continues to draw close attention.

Nittobo is expanding production of its T-Glass glass cloth as demand from AI chip makers tightens a critical part of the global semiconductor supply chain. The move matters beyond Japan because shortages of this insulating material could slow advanced chip production, raise costs, and affect technology markets worldwide.

Skyworks Solutions (Nasdaq: SWKS) has completed its combination with Qorvo, creating a US-based supplier of high-performance radio frequency (RF), power management, and analog and mixed-signal semiconductors. The company expects annual cost synergies of US$500 million or more, and says the deal will add to non-GAAP earnings per share right away.

Huawei's Kirin 9050 Pro has been fully broken down by Chinese and overseas researchers, giving the market a closer look at the company's "LogicFolding" approach. Analysis from Geekerwan and die-shot images posted by Kurnal Insights show that the flagship SoC in the Huawei Mate 90 Pro Max uses two vertically stacked dies rather than a traditional single-plane chip design.

As AI computing clusters continue to expand, performance requirements for scale-out interconnects between racks are rising rapidly. This is pushing traditional pluggable optical transceivers from 800G to 1.6T and accelerating the transition toward future 3.2T products, a shift reshaping printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing from substrate materials to processing technologies.

Samsung Electronics is expanding its thermal-management efforts for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) beyond the memory stack as increasingly large chip packages raise heat-management challenges.

Solidigm, SK Hynix's NAND subsidiary, is expanding its Taiwan production base for data center solid-state drives (SSDs), underscoring the island's growing role in the global AI server supply chain. The move could affect global SSD supply, customer sourcing, and partnerships across the fast-growing data center market.

Jedec released a new standard for silicon photonics (SiPh) testing and manufacturing controls to promote consistent reliability practices. The standard comes as SiPh experiences rapid growth due to its potential to replace copper interconnects amid AI infrastructure demand surges.

Qualcomm and Arm opened a five-day trial in US federal court in Delaware on October 5, with Qualcomm seeking to stop paying Arm royalties for up to five years, a remedy potentially worth billions of dollars. The dispute comes as Qualcomm pushes deeper into data centers, raising the stakes of a licensing relationship largely formed around the smartphone market.

Correction, Oct. 6, 2026: An earlier version of this story, citing Bloomberg, reported that Qualcomm had agreed to license patents related to Huawei's LogicFolding technology. Qualcomm said on Oct. 6 that assertions linking the agreement to LogicFolding are not accurate. The story has been revised throughout.

Da Yi Cheng Technology (DYC) has rapidly expanded in recent years, benefiting from the global semiconductor capacity expansion wave, which has driven demand for second-phase electrical and mechanical installation work. The company is now applying its experience in the US, Japan, Germany, and Singapore.