Industry Insights

Wolfspeed announced on October 7 that it has received a conditional commitment letter from the US Department of War's Office of Strategic Capital for up to US$1.5 billion in 30-year financing to build a domestic wide-bandgap semiconductor supply chain. The funding will upgrade its GaN epitaxy capabilities for next-generation communications infrastructure and electronic-warfare systems, and develop radiation-hardened technology for SiC and future GaN products.

As part of the arrangement, Wolfspeed expects to issue warrants to the Department of War for up to 7.5% of its fully diluted equity, disbursed pro rata with funding tranches.

The move sharpens a strategic pivot: after selling its GaN-on-SiC RF business to MACOM for US$125 million in 2023, Wolfspeed has shifted from an RF-device IDM model to a materials supplier focused on semi-insulating SiC substrates and GaN epitaxy.

Global Bluetooth chip shipments will grow from 8.3 billion units in 2025 to 10.3 billion in 2032, a 3.2% CAGR, according to Techno Systems Research's 2026 Wireless Connectivity Market Analysis. The bigger story is the mix shift: audio Bluetooth SoCs still hold 61% share in 2025, but data Bluetooth is catching up fast, with the two segments expected to reach roughly 50:50 by 2031–2032 as IoT applications expand.

In BLE single-mode SoCs, Nordic Semiconductor leads with 21% of shipments and 36% of revenue. Four Chinese vendors including Telink and PHYPlus hold a combined 29% of shipments but only 9% of revenue — a low-price strategy concentrated at the mid-to-low end.

Edge AI is becoming the key differentiator for BLE SoCs, moving from TinyML toward DSP/NPU-integrated parts for sensor fusion and on-device inference, with Nordic and Silicon Labs in the lead.

Beijing Shimu Microelectronics (士模微电子), a high-performance signal-chain chipmaker, has closed a Series B+ financing round of undisclosed size, with the checks written by downstream customers — test-equipment maker Shenzhen Jingzhida and CRRC Times High-Tech Investment. Founded in 2021 by Tsinghua professor and IEEE Fellow Nan Sun, the company targets data converters, the hardest analog segment to localize.

Its high-speed, high-precision ADC CM3452 consumes about 960 mW, roughly one-third of international competitors, and is reportedly the first such chip taped out and mass-produced at a domestic foundry.

The deal highlights a structural gap: China consumes about one-third of the world's analog chips, yet overall self-sufficiency is only 16–18%, falling to 10–15% in industrial grades and about 5% in automotive, where high-end ADCs remain dominated by TI and ADI.

China's general servo market rebounded to RMB 23 billion in 2025, with domestic brands capturing over 60% share for the first time — up from under 50% five years ago — while Japanese brands fell from over 50% to about 26%, according to a 2026 industry white paper. In low-voltage inverters, a RMB 29.3 billion market, domestic brands reached 46%, breaking long-standing foreign monopolies.

Local power-device makers are graduating from pure suppliers to strategic partners co-defining products with machine builders: StarPower develops custom IGBT/SiC modules with Inovance, while Silan fields an integrated "MCU + power module + gate-driver IC" portfolio.

Gaps remain at the high end — domestic high-end IGBT/SiC modules still lag in long-term reliability and batch consistency, and SiC cost barriers are slowing adoption in mid-to-low-end equipment, where price wars are squeezing R&D budgets.

onsemi's second price increase of 2026 takes effect today (October 10), covering a broad range of product lines. The company cites persistently rising costs across raw materials, manufacturing, energy and infrastructure — alongside growing demand from power, industrial and datacenter markets. It follows an earlier round of increases in the first half of the year.

This is not an isolated move. 2026 has turned into a broad-based power-semiconductor repricing: Texas Instruments, Infineon and STMicroelectronics have all implemented increases, Renesas has announced its second hike (effective January 2027), and Taiwan suppliers are reportedly planning 10–15% increases on spot products from October.

Behind the cost pass-through sits a genuine demand shift: as AI rack power climbs toward the megawatt range, power architectures are migrating from 48V to 800V HVDC — lifting per-rack content for SiC, GaN and high-efficiency MOSFETs.