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Commentary / Analysis

• Fulcrum buy could signal shift for Intel (Tuesday Jul. 19, 2011)
  Intel's agreement to acquire Fulcrum Microsystems Inc. for an undisclosed sum could signal a significant change of direction for the world's biggest chip maker toward providing a comprehensive high-performance, low power solution for data centers.
  
  
• Baseband & Application Processors on a Single Die Changing Cellphone Chip Market Dynamics (Tuesday Jul. 19, 2011)
  Forward Concepts has announced the publication of its newest study of the worldwide market for the principal chips that enable cellphones. The new study, “Cellphone Core Chip Trends,” provides an in-depth market analysis of baseband, application processor, RF & power management chips.
  
  
• ARM Processors to Ship in Nearly One-Quarter of Notebook PCs in 2015 (Tuesday Jul. 19, 2011)
  After more than 30 years of domination by a single microarchitecture—Intel Corp.’s X86—the PC microprocessor (MPU) market finally is set for some real competition, with shipments of ARM processors set to soar in the coming years and projected to appear in nearly one out of every four notebook PCs made in 2015.
  
  
• EDA Consortium Reports Revenue Increase for Q1 2011 (Monday Jul. 18, 2011)
  The EDA Consortium (EDAC) Market Statistics Service (MSS) today announced that the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry revenue increased 16 percent for Q1 2011 to $1446.4 million, compared to $1247.0 million in Q1 2010.
  
  
• IDMs to hurt pure-play foundries, says report (Monday Jul. 18, 2011)
  offer of foundry services and aggressive spending by integrated device makers (IDMs), including Intel and Samsung, is set to impact on pure-play foundries such as TSMC and UMC, according to Taipei Times, which referenced a report from Fitch Ratings.
  
  
• TSMC test runs Apple processor, says report (Friday Jul. 15, 2011)
  Foundry chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. has started making the ARM-based A6 processor Apple on a trial basis, according to a Reuters report that cited an unnamed source.
  
  
• Setting the record straight on the Intel-TSMC 3-D 'race' (Thursday Jul. 14, 2011)
  What's not to love about a story that pits semiconductor process technology leaders Intel Corp. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) against one another in a race to achieve some high-level technical goal?
  
  
• A million ARM cores to host brain simulator (Thursday Jul. 14, 2011)
  Up to a million ARM processor cores are going to be linked together to simulate the workings of the human brain in a research project in the U.K.
  
  
• Semicon keynoter urges new biz models (Wednesday Jul. 13, 2011)
  The semiconductor industry is 53 years old, accounts for 0.6 percent of worldwide GDP, and should account for more in years to come, according to Tien Wu, chief operating officer of test and packaging provider ASE.
  
  
• ST lays out strategy for analysts in HK (Wednesday Jul. 13, 2011)
  At an investors' and analysts' meeting called in Hong Kong by STMicroelectronics, the company's senior executives put their best foot forward to explain their view of the market and trends of strategic importance to the company
  
  
• ARM Forecast to Significantly Increase Lead over MIPS, Power Architecture and x86 in the Battle for the Digital Home (Tuesday Jul. 12, 2011)
  Preliminary findings from Semicast’s forthcoming report “Opportunities for Embedded Processors in the Digital Home” show ARM increased its position as the leading architecture for embedded processors in digital home applications in 2010, ahead of MIPS, Power Architecture and x86.
  
  
• Thunderbolt: A lot of noise, but very little spark (Tuesday Jul. 12, 2011)
  The newly released Thunderbolt interconnect provides two channels of bi-directional data transfer at 10-Gbps rates, which admittedly is way beyond an order of magnitude more than what the USB 2.0 protocol offers.
  
  
• The quandary of EDA software piracy (Friday Jul. 08, 2011)
  As piracy increases, vendors face difficult decisions on prevention, detection, and keeping customers happy.
  
  
• Steady and Modest Growth Mark May 2011 Sales for Semiconductor Industry (Tuesday Jul. 05, 2011)
  SIA today announced that worldwide sales of semiconductors were $25 billion for the month of May 2011, a 1.8 percent increase from the prior month when sales were $24.6 billion and a 1.3 percent growth from May 2010.
  
  
• Wafer Demand Outpaces Semiconductor Unit Growth in 2011 (Thursday Jun. 30, 2011)
  Semiconductor unit sales remain strong and are expected to reach 718 billion in 2011, an 8.6% growth over 2010. Unit sales are driving wafer demand at both advanced and mature fabs. Total silicon demand is expected to grow by 10% in 2011.
  
  
• Freescale’s makeover: How's it look? (Monday Jun. 27, 2011)
  CEO Beyer, in his keynote at Freescale Technology Forum, portrayed Freescale as a company of “embedded processing.” What pops into your head, when asked to describe Freescale in one key word?
  
  
• Opinions divided on patent reform impact (Monday Jun. 27, 2011)
  Large companies praised and individual inventors criticized the patent reforms passed in Congress seen as having moderate impact across a variety of issues.
  
  
• PCI Express takes on Thunderbolt (Thursday Jun. 23, 2011)
  The PCI Special Interest Group will launch an effort in July to create a cabled version of PCI Express that will take on the Thunderbolt interconnect developed by Intel.
  
  
• PCI Express poised for 2x upgrade (Thursday Jun. 23, 2011)
  The PCI SIG said it expects to deliver within four years a fourth-generation PCI Express delivering at least 16 GTransfers/s over copper links.
  
  
• USB SuperSpeed-Enabled Device Shipments to Approach 80 Million in 2011 (Wednesday Jun. 22, 2011)
  The primary story for USB in 2010 was the emergence of the SuperSpeed standard. 2011 should be a much bigger year for the technology, especially in mobile PCs, driven by the first chipsets from AMD that integrate SuperSpeed into the core logic chipset.
  
  
• Signs Point to a Short Slowdown - IPI Ticking UP! (Wednesday Jun. 22, 2011)
  The Semico IPI has been steadily declining since May of 2010. This indicates that the second half of 2011 and at least early 2012 will be a weak semiconductor market.
  
  
• Analyst: yield drove Globalfoundries change (Tuesday Jun. 21, 2011)
  Management changes recently announced at Globalfoundries Inc. are related to problems with 32-nm chip yield and the slowness of creating a foundry-like operation at Globalfoundries' Dresden facility in Germany, according to analysts at Nomura Equity Research.
  
  
• Gartner Says Worldwide Semiconductor Industry to Grow 5.1 Percent in 2011 With Revenue Reaching $315 Billion (Tuesday Jun. 21, 2011)
  Worldwide semiconductor revenue is projected to total $315 billion in 2011, a 5.1 percent increase from 2010 revenue of $299 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. This is down from Gartner's previous projection in the first quarter for 6.2 percent growth this year.
  
  
• Why AMD is opening up Fusion: CPU, GPU cores are the new gates (Thursday Jun. 16, 2011)
  At this week's Fusion Developers' Summit AMD Fellow Phil Rogers said that in the future the Fusion System Architecture will be agnostic to the types CPU and GPU cores used for its implementation.
  
  
• DAC 2011: How to Respond to the ITRS SoC Design Cost Slide (Thursday Jun. 16, 2011)
  If there was one thing to take away from the Design Automation Conference in San Diego last week, it's that there is a growing dissatisfaction around the limited amount of data showing silicon and software design costs for SoCs.
  
  
• The rise of China's fabless industry (Thursday Jun. 16, 2011)
  China's burgeoning fabless chip sector is leveraging competitive advantages like access to capital and foundry agreements.
  
  
• China's Fabless Market Set to Double by 2015 (Monday Jun. 13, 2011)
  Driven by strong domestic demand and soaring exports, China’s fabless semiconductor market is on a high-growth trajectory, with revenue set to double from 2010 to 2015, new IHS iSuppli research indicates.
  
  
• Intel, Samsung and Toshiba Continue to Lead Softening World Semiconductor Market, According to ABI Research (Monday Jun. 13, 2011)
  As they have for several years, Intel, Samsung and Toshiba (in that order) remain the world’s top vendors of semiconductors, in a market which is expected to see about 4% growth during 2011. That growth, however, is softer than the robust growth seen in 2010 (though still better than 2009’s dismal performance.)
  
  
• EDA earns mixed grades in latest report card (Wednesday Jun. 08, 2011)
  Gary Smith, the proverbial analyst of the EDA industry, predicts that design automation tools will become a $6.6 billion business by 2015.
  
  
• ARM to play in games consoles, says analyst (Wednesday Jun. 08, 2011)
  Having become the leading supplier of processor architecture for mobile phones ARM is set to start making inroads into the games console market, according to Semicast Research. which means variants of PowerPC, according to market research company Semicast Research.