VIA Technologies Inc (威盛電子) has filed suit against Apple Inc for allegedly infringing three US patents for microprocessors used in mobile phones and tablet computers.
VIA, a semiconductor designer based in Taipei, seeks a jury trial and an order to prohibit Apple, the world’s biggest technology company by value, from selling products containing the inventions in the US, according to a complaint filed on Thursday in a federal court in Wilmington, Delaware.
“The products at issue generally concern microprocessors included in a variety of electronic products, such as certain smartphones, tablet computers, portable media players and other computing devices,” VIA said in the complaint.
Apple will dominate Christmas sales of tablet computers as rival products based on Google Inc’s Android system are not competitive enough, researcher Gartner Inc said.
“Apple delivers a superior and unified user experience across its hardware, software and services,” Gartner research vice president Carolina Milanesi said in an e-mailed note on Thursday. “Unless competitors can respond with a similar approach, challenges to Apple’s position will be minimal.”
Worldwide media tablet sales are expected to more than triple this year and reach 63.6 million units, with Apple likely to keep a market share of more than 50 percent until 2014, Gartner said.
Apple’s iPad may account for 73 percent of sales this year, after 83 percent last year. Apart from Apple and Android, no platform is expected to have more than 5 percent of the market this year, Gartner said.
“So far, Android’s appeal in the tablet market has been constrained by high prices, weak user interface and limited tablet applications,” Milanesi said.
Android tablets are expected to account for 17 percent of the market this year, up from 14 percent last year, Gartner said.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
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