Vietnam's semiconductor landscape is evolving rapidly, with the central region emerging as a new destination for foreign semiconductor firms, complementing the established chipmaking cluster in the north and the burgeoning software and IC design hub in the south. According to DIGITIMES Research, ongoing global geopolitical tensions, Vietnam's abundant local talent pool, and its policy initiatives to achieve a balanced development across regions will continue shaping the country's semiconductor ecosystem.
In the realm of "decarbonization"-spawned green business opportunities, the spotlight shines brightly on low-carbon hydrogen, an arena deemed indispensable in the medium to long term. Taiwan has earmarked hydrogen energy as one of the twelve pivotal strategies for its transformative journey towards net-zero emissions.
The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, also known as Taiwan's "Silicon Shield," does not fully guarantee preventing war for Taiwan, says DIGITIMES Research analyst Eric Chen.
Affected by the overall global economic situation in 2023, Taiwanese industrial PC (IPC) manufacturers saw high inventory levels among their downstream customers with DIGITIMES Research estimating that the total revenue of Taiwanese IPC manufacturers reached NT$283.66 billion (US$8.66 billion) for annual decrease of 1.3% in 2023, a relatively weak performance, according to DIGITIMES Research's latest AIoT report covering Taiwanese IPC makers' performance in recent years.
DIGITIMES Research's latest report on the global smartphone industry shows that global smartphone shipments totaled around 330 million units, rising 6.5% on year.
In the past, it was the chip that created the user's needs, but when hardware has little room to expand for running Artificial Intelligence (AI) models while the difference between each generation of chips gets smaller and smaller, it's the Operating System (OS) and applications that decide the winner in the AI PC, AI smartphone and AIoT era, said DIGITIMES Research analyst and project manager Joyce Chen.
DIGITIMES Research's study on the global top-5 notebook brands, not including Apple, and the top-3 ODMs' shipments in February 2024 (shipment volumes do not include detachable models) showed their combined shipments enjoyed a 10% month-on-month increase and a 13% year-on-year increase.
Thanks to short-term orders from the electronics supply chain and HPC chip shipments, Taiwan's wafer foundry revenue increased by more than 10% in the fourth quarter of 2023, driving up the revenue for the entire year to US$79.1 billion, according to DIGITIMES Reseach's latest report on Taiwan's wafer foundry industry.
South Korea-based panel makers are investing in transparent displays and trying to expand the technology's application into more applications, while China-based display panel makers are catching up quickly, particularly in the inkjet printing for manufacturing AMOLED displays, says DIGITIMES Research.
The emerging communication technology NearLink is positioning itself as an alternative to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in the Chinese market and is competitive regarding network latency and the number of terminal connections, according to DIGITIMES Research's latest report covering communication technologies.
DIGITIMES Research believes that the neural processing unit (NPU) will bring new choices for AI accelerator chips in edge devices. Compared to general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), NPU has power consumption and price/performance ratio advantage, making it suitable to handle AI computing tasks in edge computing, according to DIGITIMES Research's findings in the new AIoT report.
