Employees at Guai Guai's Zhongli, Taiwan snack factory, operating since 1968, voted 94% in favor of a strike after the company announced it would relocate to Hsinchu. Workers can keep jobs by relocating or commuting and were offered a 5% raise, but the union says this merely matches Taiwan's mandated minimum wage increase, and they want a share of the NT$5.6 billion (US$176.1 million) the company received selling the Zhongli site to ASE for redevelopment.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-27
Nike cofounder Phil Knight and his wife Penny announced a $1 billion gift to the University of Oregon's Knight College of Engineering, the school said Wednesday. The donation arrives as Oregon accounts for roughly a tenth of the U.S. semiconductor workforce.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-25
Tower Semiconductor plans to co-invest $4 billion with the Japanese government to expand its Niigata and Toyama fabs into a major hub for optical-connectivity chips. The plan, dubbed Track One and Track Two, will convert an idle 200mm fab to 300mm production, boost output at an existing 300mm fab, and eventually add a new 300mm fab, raising total capacity to the equivalent of 45,000 300mm wafers per month by 2029.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-25
Piper Sandler's research note says eight major US tech firms are evaluating Intel's upcoming 14A chip manufacturing process. None has committed to production contracts yet, but the firm says Intel needs to land an anchor customer by late 2026 or early 2027 ahead of a planned 2028 manufacturing ramp.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-25
A Nordic Semiconductor engineer, newly joined to the company, describes debugging the security architecture of the nRF54L chip series by directly manipulating registers rather than writing firmware. While probing the Key Management Unit (KMU), which stores sensitive key data in a Secure Information Configuration Region only accessible in secure mode, they encountered unexpected memory values traced to how the debugger interacts with the chip's internal components rather than a flaw in the KMU itself.
danielmangum.com
· 2026-09-22
A report from McKinsey and the SEMI Foundation, cited by CNBC, projects that US semiconductor fabs could face up to 157,000 unfilled jobs by 2030. Only 3% of American engineering graduates currently enter the chip industry, and 73% of chip companies say they struggle to fill engineering positions, even as firms like TSMC, Intel, Samsung, Micron, and SK hynix expand US manufacturing capacity.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-18
A new McKinsey and SEMI Foundation report projects the United States could be short by as many as 157,000 semiconductor workers by 2030, even as companies like Samsung, TSMC and Intel race to build new fabrication plants domestically. Samsung executive Jon Taylor told CNBC he's worried there simply aren't enough technically trained people entering the field to staff these facilities, including Samsung's $35 billion Taylor, Texas complex set to begin production this year.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-17
In an interview, a Syensqo executive described a 'performance pyramid' framework, where commodity materials sit at the bottom and high-performance specialty materials sit at the top. He explained that AI's rapid advancement is piling on technical requirements—heat tolerance, purity, electrical performance, chemical and plasma resistance, long-term stability—that push semiconductor and data center materials toward the top of that pyramid, an area where Syensqo focuses its work.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-09-16
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an All-In Podcast interview that China will develop its own advanced lithography machines, comparable to those made by ASML, within the next three to four years. He argued China's manufacturing strength makes such a timeline achievable, despite the country's current reliance on older-generation tools from Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment that support only 90nm and possibly 28nm-class chipmaking.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-16
South Korean universities including Sogang, SKKU, Korea University and Hanyang University have launched 'contract departments' co-created with SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, blending semiconductor and AI coursework with direct hiring pathways. Students in these programs, such as Sogang's System Semiconductor Engineering track, can receive guaranteed employment at SK Hynix upon graduation, while Samsung-linked programs like SKKU's Department of Intelligent Software require passing a separate company hiring process.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-15
Ajinomoto build-up film, the insulating material used in nearly every high-end CPU, GPU, and AI accelerator package, is supplied almost entirely by one Japanese company that controls over 95% of the global market. As AI data centers scale into the gigawatt era with millions of accelerators needed, this narrow supply chain of substrate makers and a single film source is becoming a critical constraint on chip production.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-10
TSMC posted its highest-ever monthly revenue in August, totaling NT$514.8 billion ($16.35 billion), a 53.3% increase from a year earlier and 10.1% higher than July. This marks the fourth consecutive month of revenue growth for the chipmaker, fueled by sustained demand for AI-related chips.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-10
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