Industry news
What is moving in these markets
The stories worth knowing about in the markets we recruit for, and what each one means for the people who work in them. We link to the publication that reported it and add the part that is ours: whether it changes who is hiring, what they will need, and how hard those people are to find.
- Power Electronics
Dual-Side Cooling Comes to 650-V GaN for 800-V AI Data Centers
A dual-side cooled package for 650 V gallium nitride devices aimed at 800 V DC data centre architectures, set against the TOLT variants it is intended to improve on. Packaging keeps turning out to be where the 800 volt data centre race is actually decided. The device physics is largely settled; what limits a design now is getting the heat out of a package small enough to keep the power density worth having. That puts the scarcity in package design, thermal simulation and the qualification engineers who prove a new package survives, rather than in device design where most people assume it sits. It is a narrow discipline and the people in it tend to have been doing it a long time, often at one employer. Teams that have been looking for another power device designer for six months would frequently do better to hire a packaging engineer instead.
Power Electronics News · 19 October 2026 - Renewable Energy Systems
onsemi and Sungrow Target 99.3% Efficiency in Utility-Scale BESS
onsemi and Sungrow are targeting 99.3% efficiency on the PowerTitan 3.0 battery storage platform. It supports conversion units up to 450 kW, and the companies put the saving at more than 475 MWh a year on a 100 MW installation. The interesting number is not the efficiency, it is the last fraction of a percent. Above 99% the gains stop coming from device selection and start coming from topology, magnetics, switching strategy and thermal design considered together, which is a systems problem rather than a component one. The engineers who can work at that level think in terms of the whole conversion chain and are equally comfortable with the simulation and the bench, and there are not many of them. Grid-scale storage is now bidding for exactly the same power conversion designers as electric vehicle charging and AI data centre power, and storage is usually the one offering least. Anyone building a battery storage team in Europe is competing on something other than salary, or losing.
Power Electronics News · 16 October 2026 - Power Electronics
Infineon secures 200mm SiC wafer supply deal with Wolfspeed
Infineon has signed a multi-year agreement with Wolfspeed for 200 mm silicon carbide wafers, moving an existing supply arrangement from 150 mm up to 200 mm substrates. The two companies have worked together for twenty years, and the deal is about securing larger-diameter capacity as Infineon shifts its silicon carbide manufacturing to the bigger wafer size. The jump from 150 mm to 200 mm is not a scaling exercise, it is a different process. Crystal growth, epitaxy, wafer handling, breakage rates and yield all change, and the people who have actually run a 200 mm silicon carbide line rather than a silicon one are a very short list worldwide. Device makers moving to the larger wafer are hiring the same process and yield engineers, usually out of the same handful of fabs, and a multi-year supply contract of this size also needs commercial people who can hold a strategic materials agreement together. That second group is easy to underestimate and hard to replace.
eeNews Europe · 16 October 2026 - AI & Advanced Computing
Taiwan’s AI Ambitions Run into Talent Gap
AMD's David Wang told EE Times that Taiwan has substantial opportunities in rack-scale AI, physical AI and the AI PC market, but that talent may be the thing that limits how much of it the country captures. When a senior figure at a company of that size names talent as the constraint rather than capital, fabrication capacity or demand, it is worth taking at face value. The same shortage exists in Europe and shows up differently: roles open for nine months, salaries moving between offer and acceptance, and candidates holding three live processes at once. The response that works is not paying more, it is deciding faster, because in a market this tight the company that takes three weeks to give feedback loses to the one that takes three days regardless of what either is paying. That is worth saying to anyone who has had a requisition open since the summer and is wondering why nothing lands.
EE Times · 16 October 2026 - Power Electronics
Wolfspeed receives conditional $1.5b loan commitment
Wolfspeed has received a conditional loan commitment letter from the US Department of War, through its Office of Strategic Capital, for up to $1.5 billion of long-term financing. The money is to support domestic development and production of silicon carbide materials and wide bandgap power devices, with an additional focus on national security applications. For anyone recruiting in silicon carbide this changes a conversation that has been running all year. Wolfspeed engineers have been taking approaches on the assumption that the company was the risky place to be, and a conditional commitment of this size is the strongest counter-argument their management has had in some time. Expect retention to firm up and counter-offers to get easier to make. The defence element cuts the other way for European employers: work tied to national security programmes brings nationality and clearance conditions, which narrows who can do it and tends to keep people where they are. Competitors hoping to pick up experienced device and materials engineers cheaply should plan for a harder year.
PCIM News Platform · 16 October 2026 - Semiconductors & IC Design
Japan Offers GlobalFoundries $21B for U.S. Fab Expansion
Japan has offered GlobalFoundries $21 billion towards two new fabs in New York, which would lift United States chip capacity by around 10%. Analysts quoted in the reporting have raised concerns about the level of state support involved. A fab announcement is a hiring event years before it is a manufacturing one. Equipment, process and facilities engineers move at the construction stage, not at production, and programmes on this scale recruit internationally because the domestic pool is already committed. European process engineers are an obvious target: the skills transfer directly and the relocation packages attached to state-backed projects are difficult to match. Anyone recruiting process or equipment engineers in Germany or the Netherlands over the next two years is competing with that, whether they can see it in their applications or not. The quiet effect is on counter-offers, which get more expensive when a credible overseas alternative exists.
EE Times · 15 October 2026 - Photonics & Optoelectronics
Co-Packaged Optics Moves from Promise to Production Planning
At the Ayar Labs co-packaged optics summit, Meta, Broadcom, AMD and others set out how ready they are for a surge in co-packaged optics demand expected in 2028, and discussed the role of the OCI multi-source agreement in getting there. A 2028 production date means the hiring happens now, because the people are not interchangeable and cannot be trained in a year. Co-packaged optics needs engineers who are credible in photonics and in advanced packaging at the same time, and those two disciplines have historically sat in different companies, different buildings and different conferences. The individuals who bridge them are rare enough that most teams end up pairing a photonics engineer with a packaging engineer and accepting the translation cost. For the optical communications market this is the clearest signal yet of where the next three years of recruitment goes: not more transceiver designers, but people who can put optics inside a package next to silicon.
EE Times · 14 October 2026 - Vacuum, Thin-Film & Plasma
ASML’s EUV Expansion Runs Through Zeiss
ASML's plans to expand EUV production depend in part on Zeiss being able to increase its output of qualified precision optics. It is worth saying plainly what that means: the constraint on the most advanced manufacturing capability in the world is a precision optics shop, and precision optics is a craft discipline. Optical fabrication, polishing, coating and the metrology that qualifies the result are learned over years and taught largely by apprenticeship. The people are concentrated in a small corridor of southern Germany, and the supply of them does not respond quickly to demand. Anyone recruiting optics manufacturing or metrology people in that region is now competing with the EUV supply chain for a pool that cannot be grown at the speed the orders are arriving. It also explains why optics companies elsewhere in Europe have found their own retention getting harder this year without quite knowing why.
EE Times · 14 October 2026 - Semiconductors & IC Design
Europe’s Advanced Packaging Gap: Fraunhofer, Swissbit Target the Missing Middle
Fraunhofer and Swissbit are addressing what EE Times calls the missing middle in European advanced packaging: low-volume production, which sits between research and mass manufacturing. The argument is that Europe has both ends and needs an industrial model for the part in between. The missing middle is a people problem at least as much as a capital one. Taking a process from something that works in an institute to something that runs repeatably at low volume is a distinct skill, and it belongs to neither the researchers nor the high-volume manufacturing engineers. The people who can do it have usually spent time on both sides, and in Europe most of them are inside the institutes rather than in industry. That is the group every advanced packaging start-up on the continent is trying to hire, and the institutes are not keen to lose them. For our own market this is the same scarcity we see in vacuum and thin film, where the person who can qualify a process is worth more than the person who can design one.
EE Times · 13 October 2026
Where the reading comes from
We follow the trade press in these markets daily. Every story here links to the publication that reported it, and the words underneath are our own.
Tell us what you are trying to hire
Send the role, or send your CV, and it reaches Ramon rather than a queue. If it is not something we can do well, you will be told that straight away rather than a month from now.
Send us the role