Qualcomm Inc, the world’s largest supplier of chips for mobile phones, yesterday said it is stepping up its recruitment of engineers for labs in Taiwan this year in response to growing demand for 5G devices ahead of global commercialization.
Taiwanese component and hardware manufacturers are among the world’s pioneers in taking up the new-generation mobile technology, as they are better prepared to embrace the arrival of the 5G era than they were for the 4G era, Qualcomm said.
Wistron NeWeb Corp (啟碁) and Askey Computer Corp (亞旭), a wholly owned subsidiary of Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) that makes high-end routers and networking equipment, showcased their latest 5G-enabled consumer premise equipment (CPE) powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X50 processor during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, last week.
Photo: Lo Chien-yi, Taipei Times
HTC Corp (宏達電) unveiled its first 5G hub, rather than mobile phones as it did before, ahead of the opening of the annual show.
“The migration to 5G will be much faster than the last transition from 4G to 3G, as there is already a lot of 4G applications in use... 5G is becoming a reality now,” Qualcomm Taiwan president S.T. Liew (劉思泰) said.
“5G is not about mobile phones only. There is a lot of applications beyond mobile phones, including apps for industrial devices and more,” Liew said.
“Qualcomm is deepening its partnership with Taiwan and helping it reach out for 5G businesses,” he said.
The San Diego, California-based company has set up a 5G module research-and-design center in Taiwan, the second worldwide after the one at its headquarters, to assist local partners in solving engineering and technological issues and promote exchanges of 5G technology, he said.
The 5G center is one of three centers Qualcomm plans to open in Taiwan — the other two are a millimeter-wave testing center and a biometric sensor testing center.
The chipmaker has about 600 engineers at its local labs in Taipei and Hsinchu, a spike from 160 engineers last year.
The company plans to further increase its headcount this year, but declined to confirm a report by the Chinese-language Economic Daily News that it plans to add 200 more engineers.
PRICE HIKES: The war in the Middle East would not significantly disrupt supply in the short term, but semiconductor companies are facing price surges for materials Taiwan’s semiconductor companies are not facing imminent supply disruptions of essential chemicals or raw materials due to the war in the Middle East, but surges in material costs loom large, industry association SEMI Taiwan said yesterday. The association’s comments came amid growing concerns that supplies of helium and other key raw materials used in semiconductor production could become a choke point after Qatar shut down its liquefied natural gas (LNG) production and helium output earlier this month due to the conflict. Qatar is the second-largest LNG supplier in the world and accounts for about 33 percent of global helium output. Helium is
STRONG INTEREST: Analysts have pointed to optimism in TSMC’s growth prospects in the artificial intelligence era as the cause of the rising number of shareholders The number of people holding shares of chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) hit a new high last week despite a decline in its stock price, the Taiwan Depository and Clearing Corp (TDCC, 台灣集保) said. The number of TSMC shareholders rose to 2.46 million as of Friday, up 75,536 from a week earlier, TDCC data showed. The stock price fell 1.34 percent during the same week to close at NT$1,840 (US$57.55). The decline in TSMC’s share price resulted from volatility in global tech stocks, driven by rising international crude oil prices as the war against Iran continues. Dealers said
DOMESTIC COMPONENT: Huang identified several Taiwanese partners to be a key part of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin supply chain, including Asustek, Hon Hai and Wistron Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), addressing crowds at the company’s biggest annual event, unveiled a variety of new products while predicting that its flagship artificial intelligence (AI) processors would help generate US$1 trillion in sales through next year. During a two-and-a-half-hour keynote address, Huang announced plans to push deeper into central processing units (CPUs) — Intel Corp’s home turf — and introduced semiconductors made with technology acquired from start-up Groq Inc. The company even said it was developing chips for data centers in outer space. At the heart of Huang’s speech was the message that demand for computing power
OPTIMISTIC: Inflation still has a chance of remaining below the central bank’s 2 percent alert level, as Taiwan’s economy is resilient with healthy exports, the NDC minister said Taiwan’s inflation could exceed 2 percent this year if oil prices continue to surge amid escalating tensions in the Middle East, prompting the government to reassess its economic outlook, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. DGBAS Minister Chen Shu-tzu (陳淑姿) told lawmakers at a meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee that the agency’s earlier growth forecast of 1.68 percent in the consumer price index (CPI) and 7.71 percent for GDP this year did not account for the ongoing Middle East conflict and would need revision, if tensions persist. The previous forecast assumed an average international crude price of
RSS