Intel Foundry Services could be competitive with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. in the silicon foundry business by 2025 given the American microchip company's process technology roadmap, industry sources say. IFS has already attracted Qualcomm, a longstanding TSMC customer, as a client for Intel's 20-angstrom process node, for use in fabricating chips going into mobile computing platforms.

The microchip shortages that are affecting Apple, Volkswagen Group and many other companies are likely to remain in place for about 18 more months, the CEO of STMicroelectronics predicts. "Things will improve in 2022 gradually, but we will return to a normal situation...not before the first half of 2023," ST's Jean-Marc Chery said in an interview this week.

Sims Lifecycle Services, a US company specializing in recycling electronics products, can recycle or repurpose up to 6 million pounds of electronics waste every month. Jim Puckett of Sims says, "It's very hard to recycle electronics. They're not designed to be recycled."

Micron Technology reports initiating volume shipments of its 176-layer Universal Flash Storage NAND memories for use in smartphones and other mobile devices. "5G delivers multigigabit speeds to mobile devices, and a high-performance hardware foundation is critical to powering these lightning-fast mobile experiences," Micron's Raj Talluri said.

Huawei Technologies brought out the P50 and P50 Pro smartphones, which are not equipped for 5G internet service, due to US sanctions on the Chinese company and the worldwide shortages in crucial components. The two new handset models run on a Qualcomm 4G chipset.

JEDEC and the JC-42.6 Subcommittee for Low Power Memories published the JESD209-5B standard, which improves on the LPDDR5 technology and serves as an extension for the standard in the form of the new LPDDR5X. Data rates with the new standard are said to improve by 33% to 8533 Mbps.

JEP183 Guidelines for Measuring the Threshold Voltage (VT) of SiC MOSFETs can be used as a common industry guideline for measuring VT of SiC power devices, focused on N-channel vertical structure MOSFET technologies, providing a common baseline for the SiC MOSFET market. For more information and free download, visit the JEDEC website.