TrendForce reports that explosive growth in generative AI applications like chatbots has spurred significant expansion in AI server development in 2023. Major CSPs including Microsoft, Google, AWS, as well as Chinese enterprises like Baidu and ByteDance, have invested heavily in high-end AI servers to continuously train and optimize their AI models. This reliance on high-end AI servers necessitates the use of high-end AI chips, which in turn will not only drive up demand for HBM during 2023~2024, but is also expected to boost growth in advanced packaging capacity by 30~40% in 2024.

TrendForce highlights that to augment the computational efficiency of AI servers and enhance memory transmission bandwidth, leading AI chip makers such as Nvidia, AMD, and Intel have opted to incorporate HBM. Presently, Nvidia's A100 and H100 chips each boast up to 80 GB of HBM2e and HBM3. In its latest integrated CPU and GPU, the Grace Hopper Superchip, Nvidia expanded a single chip's HBM capacity by 20%, hitting a mark of 96 GB. AMD's MI300 also uses HBM3, with the MI300A capacity remaining at 128 GB like its predecessor, while the more advanced MI300X has ramped up to 192 GB, marking a 50% increase. Google is expected to broaden its partnership with Broadcom in late 2023 to produce the AISC AI accelerator chip TPU, which will also incorporate HBM memory, in order to extend AI infrastructure.

Broadcom Inc. today announced sample availability of its second generation of wireless connectivity chipset solutions for the Wi-Fi 7 ecosystem, spanning Wi-Fi routers, residential gateways, enterprise access points, and client devices. The new chips build on the ecosystem of products with Broadcom's first-generation Wi-Fi 7 chips while delivering additional functionality to a wider market.

The first chip, the BCM6765, is a highly-optimized residential access point chip that supports 320 MHz 2-stream Wi-Fi operation. This new platform system-on-chip (SoC) allows the productization of Wi-Fi 7 mass-market access points and smart repeater solutions which span the spectrum of cost, form factor, and performance. The second chip, the BCM47722, is an enterprise access point chip that also supports 320 MHz 2-stream operation along with dual IoT radios that support simultaneous operation for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Zigbee, Thread, and Matter protocols. This SoC addresses the growing needs of Internet of things (IoT) applications in the enterprise Wi-Fi market. The third chip, the BCM4390, is a low-power Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 802.15.4 combo chip designed for use in mobile devices such as handsets and tablets. It supports 160 MHz 2-stream Wi-Fi operation, dual Bluetooth, and Zigbee, Thread, and Matter protocols to service a broad set of mobile markets.

TrendForce reports that inventory reduction in Q1 fell short of expectations and coincided with the industry's traditional off-season, leading to overall subdued demand. However, due to new product release and a surge in urgent orders for specialized specifications, Q1 revenue of the global top ten IC design houses remained on par with 4Q22, with a modest QoQ increase of 0.1% for a total revenue of US$33.86 billion. Changes in ranking included Cirrus Logic slipping from the top ten as well as the ninth and tenth positions being replaced by WillSemi and MPS, respectively. The rest of the rankings remained unchanged.

The smartphone supply continues to grapple with overstock, but AI applications are entering a period of rapid growth
Qualcomm witnessed an uptick in its revenue, largely attributed to the launch and subsequent shipments of its latest flagship chip, the Snapdragon 8Gen2. The company saw 6.1% in QoQ growth in its smartphone business, which effectively offset the downturn from its automotive and IoT sectors. As a result, Qualcomm's Q1 revenue increased marginally by 0.6%, cementing its position at the top of the pack with a market share of 23.5%.

Today Apple announced a new multiyear, multibillion-dollar agreement with Broadcom, a leading U.S. technology and advanced manufacturing company. Through this collaboration, Broadcom will develop 5G radio frequency components - including FBAR filters - and cutting-edge wireless connectivity components. The FBAR filters will be designed and built in several key American manufacturing and technology hubs, including Fort Collins, Colorado, where Broadcom has a major facility.

"We're thrilled to make commitments that harness the ingenuity, creativity, and innovative spirit of American manufacturing," said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. "All of Apple's products depend on technology engineered and built here in the United States, and we'll continue to deepen our investments in the U.S. economy because we have an unshakable belief in America's future."

The global economy has faced increased inflation risks and downstream inventory corrections in 2H22, which have affected IC design houses faster than wafer foundries, as they are far more sensitive and responsive to market reversals. TrendForce reports that adverse factors such as weak overall consumption, restrictions from China, and the slowdown of corporate IT spending and CSP demand have impacted the revenue performance of the world's top 10 IC design houses in 4Q22, leading to a QoQ decline of 9.2%, or approximately US$33.96 billion.

TrendForce predicts that the revenue of these top 10 companies keep declining—though with a slight convergence—into 1Q23, owing to ongoing inventory corrections across the entire supply chain as well as Q1 being the traditional off-season for consumer demand. Demand will continue to be weak despite new product launches and inventory replenishment in the supply chain.

Giga Computing, a subsidiary of GIGABTE and an industry leader in high-performance servers, server motherboards, and workstations, today announced a new generation of GIGABYTE enterprise products that follow the Open Compute Project (OCP) Open Rack Version 3 (ORV3) standards. Supporting the latest CPU advancements on both x86 and ARM platforms, these new solutions have been designed for open, scalable, and efficient designs that are used in a wide range of deployments from small data centers to hyperscalers. The new generation of GIGABYTE enterprise products will begin with compute and storage nodes based on ORV3 standards, in addition to a new rack and multi-node tray. Some notable modifications to the new version of open rack standards include supporting greater power density that is up to 30kW/rack with a new single 48 V busbar and advanced cooling options such as direct liquid cooling (DLC). Data centers have greater options thanks to the expanding GIGABYTE server portfolio for next gen processor technology.

Evolving with modern demands, the new OCP standard reduces current draw and conduction losses. Power distribution in ORV1 relied on three 12 V busbars, but that design was superseded by ORV2 with a single 12 V busbar. However, as rack power density has the grabbed attention of data centers, a new single 48 V busbar solution has become the latest standard. Incorporating the 48 V busbar and greater rack compatibility and integration, the new GIGABYTE DO22-ST0 is a 42OU rack that has up to both 18OU and 20OU of usable rack space above and below the included 1U power shelf, which supports up to 15kW from a 5+1 power supply configuration, and three sets of switch trays.

Global market intelligence firm TrendForce reports that the revenue generation momentum of the global IC design industry slowed down in 3Q22. The main factors behind this development were the Russia-Ukraine military conflict, the recent COVID-19 lockdowns in China, the ongoing inflation, and clients undergoing inventory corrections. The total revenue of the global top 10 IC design houses came to US$37.38 billion for 3Q22, showing a QoQ decline of 5.3%. Qualcomm remained first place in the ranking of the global top 10 IC design houses by revenue for 3Q22. Broadcom returned to second place by overtaking NVIDIA and AMD, who slipped to third and fourth respectively due to weakening demand for PCs and cryptocurrency mining machines.

Regarding US-based IC design houses that were in the top 10 group for 3Q22, Qualcomm recorded a QoQ increase for the sales of smartphone SoCs and 5G modem chips. It also made gains in the automotive electronics market by expanding its collaborations with partners in the automotive industry. As a result, Qualcomm's 3Q22 revenue figures for mobile and automotive offerings reflected QoQ increases of 6.8% and 22.0% respectively. The revenue growth of these two major product categories offset the marginal decline in the revenue for RF front-end chips. Qualcomm's IC design revenue as a whole climbed up by 5.6% QoQ to US$9.90 billion for 3Q22. The company sat firmly at the top of the ranking.

ASUS today announced the availability of RT-AXE7800, a WiFi 6E router offering up to 7800 Mbps of bandwidth and robust network security. Geared up with the new 6 GHz band, it's designed to scale to the connectivity demands of those who need to deal with a large number of devices, such as hybrid workers and professional studios. WiFi 6E has up to seven additional high-speed 160 MHz channels, enabling multi-gigabit speeds with stable and consistent connections. It dramatically increases network capacity while reducing congestion, delivering higher performance for every WiFi 6E device.

ASUS RT-AXE7800, powered by a 1.7 GHz quad-core 64-bit Broadcom CPU, leverages the new 6 GHz band to deliver ultrafast data throughput for a seamless user experiences, especially for increasing needs of hybrid workers and small businesses. RT-AXE7800 is also fully compatible with ASUS AiMesh. Users can easily expand their wireless network with AiMesh-compatible routers and enjoy powerful, flexible and seamless whole-home WiFi.

Today, Intel Corporation and Broadcom Inc. showcased the industry's first cross-vendor Wi-Fi 7 demonstration, with over-the-air speeds greater than 5 gigabits per second. The trial used an Intel Core processor-based laptop with a Wi-Fi 7 solution connected to a Broadcom Wi-Fi 7 access point.

"We are proud to highlight how next-generation Wi-Fi 7 can make new mobile PC experiences possible. Industry collaboration is essential to ensure we deliver on the promises of this new wireless technology. We would like to thank our colleagues at Broadcom for their great technical cooperation, which helped enable this unprecedented, first-of-its-kind demonstration of ultra-high speed and ultra-low latency Wi-Fi 7," said Carlos Cordeiro, Intel Fellow and Wireless CTO, Client Computing Group, Intel.

Vijay Nagarajan, vice president, Wireless Connectivity Division, Broadcom, said, "Today's milestone sends a clear message: the ecosystem is ready and Wi-Fi 7 is here to deliver extraordinary capacity and blazing fast speeds to extend gigabit broadband. The reliable, low latency communication provided by Wi-Fi 7 is a key element of Broadcom's vision for connecting everything as the Internet evolves to its next iteration replete with immersive experiences. Industry collaboration is key to making this unprecedented connectivity a reality and we were delighted to work with Intel to achieve another industry first."

According to the latest TrendForce statistics, revenue of the top ten global IC design houses reached US$39.56 billion in 2Q22, growing 32% YoY. Growth was primarily driven by demand for data centers, networking, IoT, and high-end product portfolios. AMD achieved synergy through mergers and acquisitions. In addition to climbing to third place, the company also posted the highest annual revenue growth rate in 2Q22 at 70%.

Qualcomm continues in the No. 1 position worldwide, exhibiting growth in the mobile phone, RF front-end, automotive, and IoT sectors. Sales of mid/low-end mobile phone APs were weak but demand for high-end mobile phone APs was relatively stable. Company revenue reached US$9.38 billion, or 45% growth YoY. NVIDIA benefitted from expanded application of GPUs in data centers to expand this product category's revenue share past the 50% mark to 53.5%, making up for the 13% YoY slump in its game application business, bringing total revenue to US$7.09 billion, though annual growth rate slowed to 21%. AMD reorganized its business after the addition of Xilinx and Pensando. The company's embedded division revenue increased by 2,228% YoY. In addition, its data center department also made a considerable contribution. AMD posted revenue of US$6.55 billion, achieving 70% growth YoY, highest amongst the top ten. Broadcom's sales performance in semiconductor solutions remained solid and demand for cloud services, data centers, and networking is quite strong. The company's purchase order backlog is still increasing with 2Q22 revenue reaching US$6.49 billion, an annual growth rate of 31%.

ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) today announced the latest gaming gear at Gamescom 2022, including the AMD X670E series motherboards, AIO coolers, PSU, displays, networking products, and peripherals. Along with these products, ROG released its first music single Reality, with vocals by renowned voice actor and musician Troy Baker, more commonly known for his roles in video games like The Last of Us and Uncharted series. An anime-inspired interactive 360° music video featuring the song is available on YouTube.

ROG Swift OLED PG42UQ / PG48UQ: The 42-inch ROG Swift OLED PG42UQ is designed for immersive desktop gaming and features 4K visuals at an overclocked 138 Hz refresh rate. The OLED panel ensures the deepest hues, as well as vibrant colors thanks to a 98% DCI-P3 color gamut and Delta E < 2 color difference. An ultrafast 0.1 ms (GTG) response time ensures great viewing and gaming experiences. The larger, 48-inch ROG Swift OLED PG48UQ is ideal for those looking to play their games on an even bigger scale. ROG OLED monitors include a custom heatsink that offers more surface area for heat exchange, resulting in up to 8% lower operating temperatures compared to ROG monitors without a heatsink to ensure better OLED performance and longevity.

Based on media reports out of Taiwan, TSMC seems to have plenty of customers lined up for its 3 nm node, with Apple being the first customer out the gates when production starts sometime next month. However, TSMC is only expected to start the production with a mere 1,000 wafer starts a month, which seems like a very low figure, especially as this is said to remain unchanged through all of Q4. On the plus side, yields are expected to be better than the initial 5 nm node yields. Full-on mass production for the 3 nm node isn't expected to happen until the second half of 2023 and TSMC will also kick off its N3E node sometime in 2023.

Apart from Apple, major customers for the 3 nm node include AMD, Broadcom, Intel, MediaTek, NVIDIA and Qualcomm. Contrary to earlier reports by TrendForce, it appears that TSMC will continue its rollout of the 3 nm node as previously planned. Apple is expected to produce the A17 smartphone and tablet SoC, as well as advanced versions of the M2, as well as the M3 laptop and desktop processors on the 3 nm node. Intel is still said to be producing its graphics chiplets with TSMC, with the potential for GPU and FPGA products in the future. There's no word on what the other customers are planning to produce on the 3 nm node, but MediaTek and Qualcomm are obviously looking at using the node for future smartphone and tablet SoCs, with AMD and NVIDIA most likely aiming for upcoming GPUs and Broadcom for some kind of HPC related hardware.

Although Intel threw in the towel and gave up on making routers and gateways back in 2020, the company is still the world's largest manufacturer of WiFi modules for computers. Now news out of Korea suggests that Intel's first WiFi 7 products will be launched in 2024, about a year after the expected availability of the first WiFi 7 routers and gateways. That said, based on a quote from Eric McLaughlin, vice president of Intel's wireless solutions division, who attended an unspecified press conference in the APAC region, Intel "expect it to appear in major markets in 2025." This suggests that it'll be a late 2024 launch and we might see competitors' products in notebooks and PCs way ahead of Intel this time around.

That said, the WiFi 7 standard is currently only in the late stages of development, despite Broadcom, MediaTek and Qualcomm having announced multiple products already. It's likely we'll see another round of draft spec hardware launching either later this year, or next year, with the final WiFi 7 spec not expected to be ratified until 2024. As such, Intel may be later than its competitors, but should hopefully launch a feature complete product. Intel's products should support speeds of up to 5.8 GHz, although this would be using a 320 MHz wide channel and 4K QAM, which means these speeds will be limited to a few meters from a router. WiFi devices have a history of quirky issues between brands, even if none of them have been so severe that a fallback to an older standard hasn't solved the problem, but it's still been a hassle for consumers. Hopefully WiFi 7 won't repeat history, but we wouldn't place a bet on it.

According to the latest TrendForce statistics, the top ten IC designers worldwide posted a combined revenue of US$39.43 billion in 1Q22, or 44% growth YoY. Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Broadcom ranked in the top three. After the acquisition of Xilinx, AMD surpassed MediaTek in the fourth position. In addition, according to TrendForce tracking of IC design industry trends, revenue generated by Will Semiconductor and Cirrus Logic was enough to be included in the top ten for the first time.

Benefiting from growth performance in handsets and RF front-end divisions in addition to its IoT and automotive divisions in 1Q22, Qualcomm's quarterly revenue reached US$9.55 billion, or 52% growth YoY, ranking number one in the world. The expanded application of GPUs in data centers boosted this portion of NVIDIA's revenue to 45.4%, surpassing the 45% accounted for by its gaming business, combining for a total revenue of US$7.9 billion, or 53% growth YoY. Broadcom's revenue from semiconductor solutions is substantial, including network chips, broadband communication chips, and storage and bridging chips. Its business has maintained stable sales performance, with revenue reaching US$6.11 billion, or 26% growth YoY. After the addition of Xilinx, AMD's revenue reached US$5.89 billion, or 71% growth YoY. However, even excluding Xilinx, due to strong sales in its enterprise, embedded and semi-customized divisions, AMD's own business revenue still hit an all-time high of US$5.33 billion.

Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO), a global technology leader that designs, develops and supplies semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions, and VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), a leading innovator in enterprise software, today announced an agreement under which Broadcom will acquire all of the outstanding shares of VMware in a cash-and-stock transaction that values VMware at approximately $61 billion, based on the closing price of Broadcom common stock on May 25, 2022. In addition, Broadcom will assume $8 billion of VMware net debt.

VMware, a leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, pioneered virtualization technology, an innovation that positively transformed x86 server-based computing. VMware then created the software-defined data center and played a leading role in virtualizing networking and storage, before evolving to become a hybrid cloud and digital workspace leader. Today, VMware's multi-cloud portfolio, spanning application modernization, cloud management, cloud infrastructure, networking, security and anywhere workspaces, forms a flexible, consistent digital foundation on which the largest and most dynamic enterprises across industries build, run, manage, connect and protect their most important and complex workloads for the benefit of their customers.

According to TrendForce research, due to vigorous stocking of various terminal applications causing a shortage of wafers in 2021, the global IC industry was severely undersupplied. This, coupled with spiking chip prices, boosted 2021 revenue of the global top ten IC design companies to US$127.4 billion, or 48% YoY. TrendForce further indicates three major disparities from the 2020 ranking. First, NVIDIA surpassed Broadcom to take the second position. Second, Taiwanese companies Novatek and Realtek rose to sixth and eighth place, respectively. Originally ranked tenth, Dialog was replaced at this position by Himax after Dialog was acquired by IDM giant Renesas.

Qualcomm continues its reign as number one in the world, primarily due to 51% and 63% growth YoY in sales of mobile phone SoC (System on Chip) and IoT chips, respectively. The addition of diversified development in its RF and automotive chip businesses were key to a 51% increase in revenue. NVIDIA implemented an integration of software and hardware, demonstrating its ambitions in creating a "comprehensive computing platform." Driven by annual growth of gaming graphics card and data center revenue at 64% and 59%, respectively, NVIDIA successfully climbed to second place. Broadcom benefited from the stable sales performance of network chips, broadband communication chips, and storage and bridging chips, with revenue growing 18% YoY. AMD's computer and graphics revenue grew by 45% YoY due to strong sales of the Ryzen CPU and Radeon GPU and rising average selling price. Coupled with accelerating demand from cloud companies, the annual revenue of AMD's enterprise, embedded, and semi-customized divisions increased by 113%, driving annual growth of total revenue to 68%.

Based on a report by Susquehanna, the lead time for what can be called ancillary semiconductors, i.e. the kind that are paired up with processor, SoCs and GPUs, now have a lead time of over six months. This is based on data from the distribution channel and as such, it's unlikely to affect large companies that have long-term contracts with their suppliers. However, smaller companies, or semiconductor manufacturers that solely rely on the distribution channel for sales of the parts, are not in a good place right now. Obviously this doesn't affect everything equally and many parts are also in stock with the big distributors, but sometimes at inflated prices compared to a couple of years ago.

Susquehanna is pointing towards several reasons for the increase in lead times, although the big ones include the Russia's war on Ukraine, an earthquake in Japan (on the 16th of March) as well as the more recent lockdowns in several cities in the PRC which are key to the production of everything from semiconductors to finished consumer goods. At the latter half of 2020, the lead time was less than 14 weeks, but has since then increased to almost 27 weeks and it looks like it's likely to continue to increase for the time being. The worst hit components are said to be analogue chips, so things like signal amplifiers, power control oscillators and the like, which had the lead times increased by 18 over the space of a month. The report says that Broadcom has increased its shipping times by as much as 30 weeks and its backlog of orders just keeps growing. This is quite surprising, as earlier reports mentioned that the WiFi makers were reasonably unaffected by the increase in lead times, but Broadcom does make a wealth of other products too, so this could be unrelated. On a more positive note, it seems like the lead time for passive components has improved by a couple of days, with an average lead time of 25 weeks.

It appears that 2022 might be the year WiFi 7, or 802.11be as it's also known, launches, despite the fact that the specification isn't set to be ratified until 2024. Broadcom has just unveiled its first set of WiFi 7 radios, as well as accompanying SoC and it looks like the new hardware will bring a big jump in performance under the right circumstances. Broadcom's first WiFi 7 SoC will be known as the BCM4916, which sports a quad core ARMv8 processor. It appears to be a custom Broadcom design that's capable of delivering up to 24 DMIPS of performance, but beyond mentioning that it has 1 MB L2 cache and 64 kB L1 cache, Broadcom doesn't go into any specifics.

The Arm based processor is backed up by what Broadcom calls a Dual Issue Runner Network Processor, or DI-XRDP, which is a packet processor that shuffles the data around between the wired and wireless network interfaces. There's also a crypto coprocessor and Broadcom has added support for Arm TrustZone and Secure Boot, with the prior having support for a trusted execution environment. What stands out with regards to the BCM4916 compared to most current router SoCs is the wide arrange of high-speed connectivity options. For starters, it has no less than four PCIe interfaces of unspecified generation, as well as a native 10 Gbps network interface and as well as the option for two more. In addition to this, it has a further option for a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet interface, as well as a typical four port Gigabit switch built in. A pair of USB 3.2 ports are also part of the chip, but these are likely to be 5 Gbps ports. The SoC also has support for DDR3 and DDR4 memory.

According to TrendForce research, due to vigorous stocking of various terminal applications causing a shortage of wafers in 2021, the global IC industry was severely undersupplied. This, coupled with spiking chip prices, boosted 2021 revenue of the global top ten IC design companies to US$127.4 billion, or 48% YoY. TrendForce further indicates three major disparities from the 2020 ranking. First, NVIDIA surpassed Broadcom to take the second position. Second, Taiwanese companies Novatek and Realtek rose to sixth and eighth place, respectively. Originally ranked tenth, Dialog was replaced at this position by Himax after Dialog was acquired by IDM giant Renesas.

Qualcomm continues its reign as number one in the world, primarily due to 51% and 63% growth YoY in sales of mobile phone SoC (System on Chip) and IoT chips, respectively. The addition of diversified development in its RF and automotive chip businesses were key to a 51% increase in revenue. NVIDIA implemented an integration of software and hardware, demonstrating its ambitions in creating a "comprehensive computing platform." Driven by annual growth of gaming graphics card and data center revenue at 64% and 59%, respectively, NVIDIA successfully climbed to second place. Broadcom benefited from the stable sales performance of network chips, broadband communication chips, and storage and bridging chips, with revenue growing 18% YoY. AMD's computer and graphics revenue grew by 45% YoY due to strong sales of the Ryzen CPU and Radeon GPU and rising average selling price. Coupled with accelerating demand from cloud companies, the annual revenue of AMD's enterprise, embedded, and semi-customized divisions increased by 113%, driving annual growth of total revenue to 68%.

Exponential demand growth for remote and unmanned terminals in smart home, logistics, manufacturing and other end-user applications has driven iterative updates in Wi-Fi technology. Among the current generations of technologies, Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) is mainstream while Wi-Fi 6 and 6E (802.11ax) are at promotional stages, according to TrendForce's investigations. In order to meet the connection requirements of industry concepts such as the Metaverse, many major manufacturers have trained their focus on the faster and more stable next generation 802.11be Wi-Fi standard amendment, commonly known as Wi-Fi 7. Considering technical characteristics, maturity, and product certification status, Wi-Fi 6 and 6E are expected to surpass Wi-Fi 5 to become mainstream technology in 2022, with global market share expected to reach 58%.

Comcast today announced the successful test of a prototype 10G modem using the core technology that will deliver multigigabit speeds to tens of millions of homes. In a world-first lab test, a Full Duplex DOCSIS 4.0 system-on-chip (SoC) cable modem built by Broadcom delivered upload and download speeds faster than 4 gigabits per second (Gbps) powered by 10G network technology. Today's announcement is the latest in a series of 10G milestones from Comcast. In October 2021, the company announced a successful test of a complete 10G connection using a virtualized cable modem termination system (vCMTS) powered by DOCSIS 4.0 technology. That announcement followed major 10G milestone announcements in April 2021, of the first-ever live lab test of a 10G system-on-chip (SOC) and October 2020, of a trial delivering 1.25 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) upload and download speeds over a live production network using Network Function Virtualization (NFV) combined with the latest DOCSIS technology

A key component of 10G, DOCSIS 4.0 is an evolutionary leap forward in the ability to deliver multigigabit upload and download speeds over the connections already installed in hundreds of millions of homes worldwide. "The great strength of our smart network design is that we are able to exceed our customers' demands today, even as we continuously evolve to meet the needs of the future," said Charlie Herrin, President of Technology, Product, Experience at Comcast Cable. "As our 10G journey continues to accelerate, customers will reap the benefits of ever-increasing security, reliability, and speed."

The semicondustor market in 3Q21 is red hot with total revenue of the global top 10 IC design (fabless) companies reaching US$33.7 billion or 45% growth YoY, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. In addition to the Taiwanese companies MediaTek, Novatek, and Realtek already on the list, Himax comes in at number ten, bringing the total number of Taiwanese companies on the top 10 list to 4.

Qualcomm has been buoyed by continuing robust demand for 5G mobile phones form major mobile phone manufacturers with further revenue growth from its processor and radio frequency front end (RFFE) departments. Qualcomm's IoT department benefited from strong demand in the consumer electronics, edge networking, and industrial sectors, posting revenue growth of 66% YoY, highest among Qualcomm departments. In turn, this drove Qualcomm's total 3Q21 revenue to US$7.7 billion, 56% growth YoY, and ranking first in the world.

ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) today announced Rapture GT-AX6000, a high-performance WiFi 6 (802.11ax) gaming router with a striking all-new design. The futuristic ROG Rapture GT-AX6000 gaming router lets gamers connect more devices, and upgrades their gaming experience to the next level. Powered by a 2.0 GHz 64-bit quad-core Broadcom CPU and flagship next-gen Broadcom WiFi 6 chipsets, it delivers wireless speeds up to 6000 Mbps with ASUS RangeBoost Plus for enhanced range, so it's always primed for the biggest battles. Fully customizable ASUS Aura RGB lighting effects make the GT-AX6000 a router that demands to be seen. Built for high-speed throughput to deliver more bandwidth to more devices, the GT-AX6000 features two 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports, and the router supports both WAN and LAN aggregation.

The ROG Rapture GT-AX6000 is a powerful 4x4 dual-band WiFi 6 router that delivers combined speeds of up to 6000 Mbps—1148 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz band and 4804 Mbps on the 5 GHz band—which is up to 2.3X faster than a 4x4 dual-band WiFi 5 router. With a combination of 160 MHz channels, OFDMA and MU-MIMO technology, WiFi 6 provides up to 4X-greater network capacity and efficiency in traffic-dense environments, making it ideal for heavily populated networks.

It's been nearly six years since we unleashed the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero on an unsuspecting world. Of all the products we've launched, Zero is still the one I'm proudest of: it most perfectly embodies our mission to give people access to tools, and to eliminate cost as a barrier. We've sold nearly four million units of Zero, and its $10 wireless-enabled big brother Zero W, and they've made their way into everything from smart speakers to hospital ventilators. But where our larger products have grown steadily more powerful over the years, we've never found a way to pack more performance into the Zero form factor. Until today.

Priced at $15, Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W uses the same Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC die as the launch version of Raspberry Pi 3, with Arm cores slightly down-clocked to 1GHz, bundled into a single space-saving package alongside 512 MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM. The exact performance uplift over Zero varies across workloads, but for multi-threaded sysbench it is almost exactly five times faster.

In view of the ongoing production capacity shortage in the semiconductor industry and the resultant price hike of chips, revenue of the top 10 IC design companies for 2Q21 reached US$29.8 billion, a 60.8% YoY increase, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. In particular, Taiwanese companies put up remarkable performances during this period, with both MediaTek and Novatek posting YoY growths of more than 95%. AMD, on the other hand, experienced a nearly 100% YoY revenue growth, the highest among the top 10.

TrendForce indicates that the ranking of the top five companies for 2Q21 remained unchanged from the previous quarter, although there were major changes in the 6th to 10th spots. More specifically, after finalizing its acquisition of Inphi, Marvell experienced a major revenue growth and leapfrogged Xilinx and Realtek in the rankings from 9th place in 1Q21 to 7th place in 2Q21.