TOK has finished a 23-billion-yen photoresist building in Koriyama. Its 2023 and 2026 releases mention neither AI nor capacity; its earnings documents show how demand and the start date shifted in between.
Kanazawa University and AIST report the first vertical diamond MOSFET with an inversion-layer channel. Diamond transistors that switch off this way existed by 2016; what is new is building one vertically.
ABLIC's CLEAN-Boost banks tiny amounts of ambient energy and releases them in one burst, amplified up to 30,000 times. Inside the battery-less sensor that trips on 150 microliters of water.
Hafnium keeps advanced chips and jet engines running, yet the world makes about 71 tonnes a year, nearly all of it in France and the United States. An Osaka chemical maker now wants a share of it by 2028.
Navitas sued Renesas on August 10, 2026 over four US patents covering SuperGaN. The CEO who filed it once ran that business inside Renesas, which sued first over trade secrets and holds 39.9 percent of Wolfspeed.
Sony and TSMC signed a binding deal on August 11 to build smartphone image sensors in Kumamoto, contributing about 747 billion yen ($4.7 billion) toward production in 2029. TSMC takes only 38% and lets Sony lead.
Kioxia's XL1 module pulls flash memory into the memory hierarchy over CXL to ease the DRAM crunch in AI data centers. What it can and cannot do, and why it matters for a country that no longer makes DRAM.
The July 28, 2026 Kumamoto earthquake hit shindo 7 and stopped chip plants run by Renesas, Sony, Mitsubishi Electric, TSMC's JASM and Tokyo Electron. The fab the world watched was not the real chokepoint: a coater/developer plant with roughly 90 percent of the world market was.
On July 15, 2026, Nvidia's Jensen Huang stood in a Tokyo arcade and thanked Sega for the $5 million that saved his company in the 1990s. The story ran everywhere. What almost nobody mentioned: the executive being thanked had helped pick the technology that failed.
Resonac, BEAM and Nippon LEO signed an MOU to manufacture compound semiconductors in low Earth orbit. Why build chips in microgravity, and how Japan's bet compares to the US and China.
Glass is the front-runner for AI chip packaging substrates, but its smooth surface won't hold wiring. Nikon's new PAP material uses light to solve it. A look at the hidden Japanese chokepoints in the chip-substrate supply chain.