One of the biggest drawbacks of modern CPUs is that adding more cores doesn't equal more performance in a linear fashion. Parallelism in CPUs offer limited scaling for most applications and even none for some. A South Korean company called Morumi is now taking a stab at solving this problem and wants to develop a CPU that can offer more or less infinite processing scaling, as more cores are added. The company has been around since 2018 and focused on various telecommunications chips, but has now started the development on what it calls every one period parallel processor (EOPPP) technology.

EOPPP is said to distribute data to each of the cores in a CPU before the data is being processed, which is said to be done over a type of mesh network inside the CPU. This is said to allow for an almost unlimited amount of instructions to be handled at once, if the CPU has enough cores. Morumi already has an early 32-core prototype running on an FPGA and in certain tasks the company has seen a tenfold performance increase. It should be noted that this requires software specifically compiled for EOPPP and Moumi is set to release version 1.0 of its compiler later this year. It's still early days, but it'll be interesting to see how this technology develops, but if it's successfully developed, there's also a high chance of Morumi being acquired by someone much bigger that wants to integrate the technology into their own products.

According to TrendForce's research, global DRAM revenue fell by 32.5% QoQ to US$12, 281 million for 4Q22. The QoQ decline for 4Q22 is larger than the QoQ decline of 28.8% for 3Q22 and comes close to the QoQ decline of 36% for the final quarter of 2008, when the global economy was in the midst of a major financial crisis. The main cause of the steep revenue drop in 4Q22 was the plummeting overall ASP. DRAM suppliers experienced a rapid accumulation of inventory in 3Q22 due to a freeze in buyers' demand. Subsequently, suppliers were much more energetic in price negotiations for 4Q22 contracts as they were struggling for market share. Among the major categories of DRAM products, server DRAM suffered the sharpest price drop in 4Q22. Contract prices of DDR4 and DDR5 server DRAM products registered QoQ drops of 23~28% and 30~35% respectively.

It's not just TSMC and the other Taiwanese chip makers that are seeing a dip in demand, the Korean chip makers have seen a slump of 15 percent in the past four months, compared to 2021. This is said to be the biggest drop in chip demand since 2009 according to data from Statistics Korea. There's a combination of factors behind the slump in demand, especially when it comes to memory related products, where inventories already are high, combined with inflation and a low demand.

According to the Financial Times, an analyst at JPMorgan in Korea isn't expecting things to improve until 2024 at the earliest. Just like Micron and Kioxia, SK hynix is looking at cutting spending on new fabs and production lines, although as TPU reported earlier this week, Samsung is going its own way, by continuing to invest in new fabs and production lines. Samsung is expected to have a capex of US$37.5 billion this year back in October, although based on the increase in costs, the capex would have increased in the fourth quarter of the year. On the plus side, it seems like the shortage of semiconductors should ease in 2023 and hopefully return to more normal levels.

According to Reuters, Samsung is gearing up to increase the chip production capacity at its P3 factory in Pyeongtaek in South Korea, despite the fact that there's a general slowdown in the semiconductor industry, in addition to the general economic downturn. Samsung is apparently planning on adding 12-inch wafer capacity for DRAM, while also adding more 4 nm chip capacity. The P3 fab kicked off production of Samsung's most cutting-edge NAND flash chips earlier this year and is the company's largest fab overall. According to Reuters, Samsung is aiming to add at least 10 new EUV machines in 2023.

In related news via The Elec, Samsung has seen costs increase significantly when it comes to materials costs relating to the expansion of the P3 fab. So far, the company has racked up extra costs of over a trillion korean Won, or more than US$786 million, largely due to all of its contractors having raised their prices. The report also mentioned that some parts of the expansion of the P3 fab has been delayed by as much as a year, which isn't good news for Samsung and it likely means that the company will see further increases in costs before the expansions are finished.

Semiconductor manufacturers worldwide are forecast to expand 300 mm fab capacity at a nearly 10% compound average growth rate (CAGR) from 2022 to 2025, reaching an all-time high of 9.2 million wafers per month (wpm), SEMI announced today in its 300 mm Fab Outlook to 2025 report. Strong demand for automotive semiconductors and new government funding and incentive programs in multiple regions are driving much of the growth.

"While shortages of some chips have eased and supply of others has remained tight, the semiconductor industry is laying the groundwork to meet longer-term demand for a broad range of emerging applications as it expands 300 mm fab capacity," said Ajit Manocha, SEMI President and CEO. "SEMI is currently tracking 67 new 300 mm fabs or major additions of new lines expected to start construction from 2022 to 2025."

The economic downturn keeps pushing the PC and related manufacturing markets down, following slumps in demand stemming from increased cost of living, the veritable arms race to technological products during COVID-19, and manufacturer's efforts to increase output to provide enough product to meet said demand. But all that goes up must eventually come down, and now South Korean manufacturers are facing the result of months of decreased consumption, with stock levels increasing ahead of actual product uptake (stocks have reached 67.3% of produced goods and factory shipments have declined 20.4%). This has now led to a 1.7% decline in August's output when compared to the same period last year - the first time the South Korean industry has seen negative growth since 2018.

Samsung and Kioxia both have announced a reduction in production output in the months to come, which should give distribution enough time to clear some of the accumulated inventory. The scales of production typically occur in cycles - ones with excess manufacturing against demand, and other times where the reverse happens. It seems we're now in the descending part of the spectrum, with prices - especially of NAND - being expected to drop in the coming months. It will take a while until the manufacturing reduction makes itself felt in the overall IC pricing landscape. Micron too has announced it's slowing down the production ramp-up of its 232-layer 3D NAND so as not to contribute in excess towards an already over-saturated market.

The latest episode in the whole Terra/LUNA debacle - which saw $40 billion in crypto evaporating in a few hours - showcases that the crypto world doesn't operate within its own locked ecosystem. A court order for the arrest of Terra founder Do Kwon and five others was issued this Wednesday morning, on charges of violating the Capital Markets Act. LUNA fell 36% in the past 24 hours while LUNC (Luna Classic, representing the circulating LUNA tokens before the UST stablecoin's catastrophic depeg from the dollar value) dropped 25%, with much of the price movement coming after news of the warrant was made public on Wednesday morning.

The Terra/LUNA debacle brought about billions in losses across the cryptocurrency ecosystem, with multiple companies in the crypto finance area (from DeFi [Decentralized Finance] through CeFi [Centralized Finance] players such as Celsius Network, Voyager Digital and Three Arrows Capital claiming bankruptcy as their Terra/LUNA investments and reserves trended towards zero value. Accusations have been spread left and right that Terra/LUNA operated like a Ponzi Scheme - it remains to be seen whether that's the interpretation of the South Korea justice system.

With the course of the COVID-19 pandemic constantly changing, China is sticking with its "Dynamic Zero-COVID Policy" and has been slow to lift the lockdown on its cities that have been recently affected by the outbreaks of the disease. Hence, the manufacturing industries of the major Chinese cities are facing delays in the resumption of normal operation, and a production gap has emerged in 2Q22. For the electronics ODMs, this production gap will be difficult to bridge in 2H22. Additionally, the ongoing global inflation is keeping prices of goods at a very high level, and this trend will dampen the peak-season demand surge during the second half of the year. The effect of the inflationary pressure has been especially noticeable in the demand for consumer electronics such as smartphones, notebook computers, and tablet computers. This, in turn, is also impacting the MLCC market in terms of demand and inventory. Currently, the general inventory level has risen above 90 days for MLCCs of all sizes. Therefore, TrendForce forecasts that prices of consumer-spec MLCCs will fall further by 3-6% on average in 2H22.

On the other hand, demand remains fairly strong in application segments such as high-performance computing solutions (which include servers), networking equipment, industrial automation solutions, and energy storage systems. Furthermore, IDMs in the semiconductor industry will be adjusting the allocation of production capacity as the market for consumer electronics continues to experience a slowdown in 2H22. As a result, the undersupply situation for certain ICs will ease. Moreover, demand will be propped up in the high-end segment of the MLCC market and other application segments (e.g., automotive electronics and industrial equipment). All in all, thanks to the demand related to automotive electronics, servers, networking equipment, etc., TrendForce forecasts that the annual total MLCC shipments will increase by 2% YoY to around 2.58 trillion pieces for 2022.

Intel's revamped IDM 2.0 strategy has seen the company revise its stance in both in-house and outsourced silicon fabrication. While we're already seeing the fruits of Intel's collaboration with TSMC (albeit at the relatively slow pace of introduction for Intel's Arc Alchemist graphics), it seems that Intel is willing to go much farther than just TSMC as a source of chips for its product portfolio.

That's the backdrop to which Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger recently took a trip to South Korea's capital of Seoul. According to the Korea Herald, Gelsinger met several key Samsung executives, including Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong, co-CEO and chip business boss Kyung Kye-hyun, and head of Samsung Mobile Roh Tae-moon. More than enough executive grunt to ignite talks of a deepening collaboration between both companies. While the reporting source doesn't provide any quotes or actionable intel from the meeting, Samsung remains one of the key semiconductor manufacturers alongside Intel itself and TSMC, with a particularly strong portfolio in memory-related technologies.

According to TrendForce research, looking at NAND Flash wafers, the pricing of which more sensitively reflects the market, suppliers are increasingly motivated to cut prices in exchange for sales due to weak retail demand since March and a more conservative outlook for shipments of other end products. The price of NAND Flash wafers is expected to begin falling in May and the supply of NAND Flash will gradually overtake demand in 2H22. The price decline of NAND Flash wafers in 3Q22 may reach 5~10%.

At the same time, TrendForce indicates that February's contamination incident at Kioxia was expected to tighten the market in 2Q22 and 3Q22. However, as a consequence of rising inflation and the war between Russia and Ukraine, market demand for consumer products in the traditional peak season of the second half of the year is trending conservative and the prices of client SSD, eMMC, and UFS in 3Q22 will be flat compared to 2Q22, breaking from the original expectation that prices may rise. In terms of enterprise SSDs, as demand for data centers remains strong, no significant correction in demand has yet been observed. However, as the overall NAND Flash market gradually moves into oversupply, prices will only grow slightly by approximately 0~5% in 3Q22.

According to TrendForce, Taiwan is crucial to the global semiconductor supply chain, accounting for a 26% market share of semiconductor revenue in 2021, ranking second in the world. Its IC design and packaging & testing industries also account for a 27% and 20% global market share, ranking second and first in the world, respectively. Firmly in the pole position, Taiwan accounts for 64% of the foundry market. In addition to TSMC possessing the most advanced process technology at this stage, foundries including UMC, Vanguard, and PSMC also have their own process advantages. Under the looming shadow of chip shortages caused by the pandemic and geopolitical turmoil in the past two years, various governments have quickly awakened to the fact that localization of chip manufacturing is necessary to avoid being cut off from chip acquisition due to logistics difficulties or cross-border shipment bans. Taiwanese companies have ridden this wave to become partners that governments around the world are eager to invite to set up factories in various locales.

Intel and AMD will be releasing new CPUs that support DDR5 DRAM solutions for PCs and servers this year. In response, the DRAM industry led by South Korean suppliers is developing solutions to complement the arrival of the new CPUs. In the midst of the gradual shift to DDR5, DRAM suppliers will also scale back the supply of DDR3 solutions, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. With Korean suppliers accelerating their withdrawal from DDR3 production, Taiwanese suppliers yet to kick off mass production using newly installed capacities, and Chinese suppliers falling short of their expected yield rate, the global supply of DDR3 solutions will undergo an impending decline. With respect to the demand side, however, not only has the supply of networking chips been ramping up, but material shortage issues are also gradually easing. As such, buyers are now procuring DDR3 solutions ahead of time, resulting in a tight supply and demand situation in the DDR3 market. TrendForce therefore expects DDR3 DRAM prices to recover from a bearish first quarter and undergo a 0-5% QoQ increase in 2Q22.

3DMark Fire Strike Hall of Fame is where overclockers submit their best hardware benchmark trials and try to beat the very best. For years, one record managed to hold, and today it just got defeated. According to an extreme overclocker called "biso biso" from South Korea and a part of the EVGA OC team, the top spot now belongs to the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card. The previous 3DMark Fire Strike world record was set on April 22nd in 2020, when Vince Lucido, also known as K|NGP|N, set a record with four-way SLI of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPUs. However, that record is old news since January 27th, when biso biso set the history with AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU.

The overclocker scored 62389 points, just 1,183 more from the previous record. He pushed the Navi 21 XTX silicon that powers the Radeon RX 6900 XT card to an impressive 3,147 MHz. Paired with a GPU memory clock of 2370 MHz, the GPU was probably LN2 cooled to achieve these results. The overclocker used EVGA's Z690 DARK KINGPIN motherboard with Intel Core i9-12900K processor as a platform of choice to achieve this record. You can check it out on the 3DMark Fire Strike Hall of Fame website to see yourself.

LG Display, the world's leading innovator of display technologies, unveiled today its newest OLED TV technology OLED EX. The next-generation OLED EX display implements LG Display's deuterium and personalized algorithm-based EX Technology, which helps boost the innovative display's overall picture quality by enhancing brightness up to 30 percent compared to conventional OLED displays.

The OLED EX name is an acronym of "Evolution" and "eXperience", which represents the company's goal of providing customers with new experiences through its ever-evolving OLED technology. OLED displays are self-emissive by nature with their multiple millions of pixels emitting light independently without a separate backlight source. This distinctive characteristic lets OLED EX achieve the perfect black, rich and accurate color expression as well as an extremely fast response time.

Samsung Electronics today announced it will be showcasing 13 innovative projects from its C-Lab program at CES 2022. Samsung will unveil four exciting projects from C-Lab Inside, its in-house venture program, and nine startups supported by C-Lab Outside, the company's startup acceleration program, to the public.

Started in December 2012, C-Lab Inside nurtures employees' innovative ideas while instilling a corporate culture in which creativity is at the fore. The program supports the development of ideas from all areas of the business. Since 2015, Samsung has been supporting successful C-Lab projects that demonstrate great market potential, and facilitating their launch as startups under the C-Lab spin-off policy. Leveraging the success of the C-Lab Inside initiative, C-Lab Outside has been expanding Samsung's support for new ventures to startups and innovations outside of the Samsung network since 2018.

The Federal Trade Commission today sued to block U.S. chip supplier Nvidia Corp.'s $40 billion acquisition of U.K. chip design provider Arm Ltd. Semiconductor chips power the computers and technologies that are essential to our modern economy and society. The proposed vertical deal would give one of the largest chip companies control over the computing technology and designs that rival firms rely on to develop their own competing chips. The FTC's complaint alleges that the combined firm would have the means and incentive to stifle innovative next-generation technologies, including those used to run datacenters and driver-assistance systems in cars.

"The FTC is suing to block the largest semiconductor chip merger in history to prevent a chip conglomerate from stifling the innovation pipeline for next-generation technologies," said FTC Bureau of Competition Director Holly Vedova. "Tomorrow's technologies depend on preserving today's competitive, cutting-edge chip markets. This proposed deal would distort Arm's incentives in chip markets and allow the combined firm to unfairly undermine Nvidia's rivals. The FTC's lawsuit should send a strong signal that we will act aggressively to protect our critical infrastructure markets from illegal vertical mergers that have far-reaching and damaging effects on future innovations."

IBM today announced its new 127-quantum bit (qubit) 'Eagle' processor at the IBM Quantum Summit 2021, its annual event to showcase milestones in quantum hardware, software, and the growth of the quantum ecosystem. The 'Eagle' processor is a breakthrough in tapping into the massive computing potential of devices based on quantum physics. It heralds the point in hardware development where quantum circuits cannot be reliably simulated exactly on a classical computer. IBM also previewed plans for IBM Quantum System Two, the next generation of quantum systems.

Quantum computing taps into the fundamental quantum nature of matter at subatomic levels to offer the possibility of vastly increased computing power. The fundamental computational unit of quantum computing is the quantum circuit, an arrangement of qubits into quantum gates and measurements. The more qubits a quantum processor possesses, the more complex and valuable the quantum circuits that it can run.

The 58th annual edition of the TOP500 saw little change in the Top10. The Microsoft Azure system called Voyager-EUS2 was the only machine to shake up the top spots, claiming No. 10. Based on an AMD EPYC processor with 48 cores and 2.45GHz working together with an NVIDIA A100 GPU and 80 GB of memory, Voyager-EUS2 also utilizes a Mellanox HDR Infiniband for data transfer.

While there were no other changes to the positions of the systems in the Top10, Perlmutter at NERSC improved its performance to 70.9 Pflop/s. Housed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Perlmutter's increased performance couldn't move it from its previously held No. 5 spot.

Samsung Electronics today reported financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2021. Total consolidated revenue was KRW 63.67 trillion, a 20% increase from the previous year and a record for the second quarter. Operating profit increased 34% from the previous quarter to KRW 12.57 trillion as market conditions improved in the memory market, operations normalized at the Austin foundry fab, and as effective global supply chain management (SCM) helped maintain solid profitability for the finished product businesses.

The Semiconductor business saw a significant improvement in earnings as memory shipments exceeded previous guidance and price increases were higher than expected, while the Company strengthened its cost competitiveness. For the Display Panel Business, a one-off gain and an increase in overall prices boosted profits.

Samsung Electronics plans to build a new cutting-edge semiconductor fab in Austin, Texas, according to an ETimes report. An official announcement to this effect will be made later today, when South Korean President Moon and U.S. President Biden are scheduled to hold their first Summit meeting, in Washington DC. The facility will offer third-party contract manufacturing of semiconductor chips on the 5 nanometer EUV process. Samsung has earmarked an investment of $18 billion toward the construction of this fab, which will be located close to the company's existing foundry in Texas, which manufactures chips on the 14 nm node. Samsung's investment is in response to rising demand of high-volume logic chips by major American firms such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Tesla.

The South Korean government, along with 153 Korean companies, has unveiled an ambitious plan to invest USD $450 billion over the next decade, to make its semiconductor manufacturing industry globally competitive, as China and the U.S. are executing similar national plans of their own, which threaten to blunt South Korea's competitiveness in the industry. Leading the effort will be Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.

Samsung will be spending over $151 billion through 2030 in expanding its manufacturing facilities, while SK Hynix will spend $97 billion to expand its existing facilities; in addition to $106 billion planned to build four new fabs in the Yongin. Both Samsung and SK Hynix are predominantly memory companies, manufacturing DRAM and NAND flash products. This means that while Korea is globally competitive in semiconductor manufacturing overall, it is relying mainly on memory dies, and not logic dies (chips such as ASICs, CPUs, GPUs, SoCs, FPGAs, etc). The two could put in efforts to change this, so their foundry capacity attracts fabless logic IC companies away from Taiwan's TSMC, which specializes in logic over memory.

Today, we are getting a report coming from the South Korean press, stating that the country of South Korea has just given SK Hynix the green light to start building the mega factory complex. Being in the planning phase for a long time, the new mega factory is going to be located in Yongin, a city set 50 km south of the capital Seoul. The company expects to break ground with construction in Q4 of this year, and finish everything and start volume production of DRAM in 2025. When it comes to the size of the new mega factory, the plant is going to have an area of ​​4.15 million square meters.

The total cost of it will be about $106 billion worth of investment from SK Hynix, making all the recent fab construction plans look tiny compared to this massive investment. The mega factory complex would consist out of four fabs, where their total wafer per month output would be around 800,000. These foundries will be in charge of producing regular DRAM, and next-generation DRAM technologies like we have talked about just a few days ago. It remains to be seen what the company will come out with in the future, however, we are watching its moves closely.

On March 22nd, the CEO of SK Hynix, Seok-Hee Lee, gave a keynote speech to the IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS) and shared with experts a part of its plan for the future of SK Hynix products. The CEO took the stage and delivered some conceptual technologies that the company is working on right now. At the center of the show, two distinct products stood out - 3D NAND and DRAM. So far, the company has believed that its 3D NAND scaling was very limited and that it can push up to 500 layers sometime in the future before the limit is reached. However, according to the latest research, SK Hynix will be able to produce 600-layer 3D NAND technology in the distant future.

So far, the company has managed to manufacture and sample 512Gb 176-layer 3D NAND chips, so the 600-layer solutions are still far away. Nonetheless, it is a possibility that we are looking at. Before we reach that layer number, there are various problems needed to be solved so the technology can work. According to SK Hynix, "the company introduced the atomic layer deposition (ALD) technology to further improve the cell property of efficiently storing electric charges and exporting them when needed, while developing technology to maintain uniform electric charges over a certain amount through the innovation of dielectric materials. In addition to this, to solve film stress issues, the mechanical stress levels of films is controlled and the cell oxide-nitride (ON) material is being optimized. To deal with the interference phenomenon between cells and charge loss that occur when more cells are stacked at a limited height, SK Hynix developed the isolated-charge trap nitride (isolated-CTN) structure to enhance reliability."

EMTEK has only graced our news feed once before, mostly due to it being a behind-the-scenes board partner for NVIDIA. More than release their in-house designs, the South Korean company usually provides them for other AIBs, such as Palit. However, the company has recently been moving their graphics cards towards the consumer market as well, and the latest in the batch is a custom-designed GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card, marketed under the "Blower Edition" product SKU.

The "Blower Edition" RTX 3090 from EMTEK features a more mainstream dual-8-pin power delivery connector with a twist: the company adapted NVIDIA's PCB design and added a daughter card, which extends the original PCB so as to allow the connectors to be placed in the more practical manner of generations past. The RTX 3090 "Blower Edition" otherwise offers the usual 3x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI connectors, and features a bronze design with a bronze backplate as well; a somewhat subdued design language is used, though the color choice would be a hard one to integrate into most hobbyists' systems.

Research and development spending by semiconductor companies worldwide is forecast to grow 4% in 2021 to $71.4 billion after rising 5% in 2020 to a record high of $68.4 billion, according to IC Insights' new 2021 edition of The McClean Report—A Complete Analysis and Forecast of the Integrated Circuit Industry. Total R&D spending by semiconductor companies is expected to rise by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.8% between 2021 and 2025 to $89.3 billion.

When the world was hit by the Covid-19 virus health crisis in 2020, wary semiconductor suppliers kept a lid on R&D spending increases, even though total semiconductor industry revenue grew by a surprising 8% in the year despite the economic fallout from the deadly pandemic. Semiconductor R&D expenditures as a percentage of worldwide industry sales slipped to 14.2% in 2020 compared to 14.6% in 2019, when research and development spending declined 1% and total semiconductor revenue fell 12%. Figure 1 plots semiconductor R&D spending levels and the spending-to-sales ratios over the past two decades and IC Insights' forecast through 2025.