World Region – Asia

Globalfoundries has filed papers to officially close its FD-SOI fab in Chengdu, China and lay off its 74 employees. GloFo and the town of Chengdu had a jv to build a $10 billion 300mm fab for 22nm FD-SOI. The plan was to  begin production of mainstream process technologies in 2018 and then focus on manufacturing 22FD-SOI, with volume production expected to ...

Singapore is top of the "IMD World Talent Ranking" of Asian countries mainly due to its high quality education.

China’s GDP continues its fall and will hit 6% in Q3, says IC Insights. China’s 2017 GDP was 6.9% and 6.6% in 2018. IC Insights forecasts further slowing in China’s GDP growth rate to 6.1% this year (the latest IMF forecast released this month also calls for 6.1% growth this year while the World Bank forecast is for China’s economy ...

Chinese VC investment in the US has fallen to $4 billion in the first nine months of this year this year from $7 billion in the first nine months of  last year and $9 billion in the same period in 2017, reports the FT. Overall foreign VC investments in the US were $51 billion in the first nine months of ...

Toshiba, one of the most respected names in the history of the semiconductor industry, has decided to call itself Kioxia. Along with the new name comes a new ‘brand identity’, a corporate colour and a ‘fun-driven culture.’ Silver will be the company’s official corporate color, ‘meant to represent the superior quality of its memory technology.’ In addition to silver, the ...

China is trying to get its domestic chip companies to list on the Shanghai STAR market to encourage a flow of funds into the IC sector, reports the Nikkei. Among those companies reported to be lined up for an IPO on STAR  are: Horizon Robotics, an AI startup aimed at driverless cars; Bestechnic, a Bluetooth and audio specialist chip startup ...

The question being asked about Foxconn founder Terry Gou pulling out of Taiwan’s presidential election is: Was China behind it? Gou was defeated in the primary to be the candidate of the pro-China Kuomintang (KMT) party. He then said he might run as an independent. On Wednesday, he said he wouldn’t. The speculation in Taiwan is that Beijing calculated that ...

Foreign acquisitions by Chinese entities in H1 fell 42% y-o-y to $24.5 billion which represents a fifth of the peak reached in H1 2016, reports Dealogic. The number of foreign acquisitions sank to 251 in H1 – the lowest for five years. Chinese acquisitions in the US have dropped by 87% over the past three years,and by 91% decline in Europe. One reason ...

Thanks to Mike Bryant for pointing out this Chinese GPU development. 13 year-old Jingjia Micro of Changsha City, China has two GPUs in development. The JM7200, is a 28nm part clocked at 1.2GHz with 4GB of DDR3 memory. It compares with an Nvidia GeForce GT 640 in performance terms. The  JM7200 has a 10W TDP, the GT640 has a TDP ...

On Friday, Huawei is set to unveil its HongMeng OS – its alternative to Android which the US government is preventing Huawei from using. Huawei could put a smartphone using the HongMeng OS on the market in Q4, reports the China newspaper Global Times. It is reported that the first use of HongMeng in a smartphone will be in a ...