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Commentary / Analysis

• Freescale vs. TI: Base station SoC battle (Monday Feb. 14, 2011)
  In response to various network operators’ diverging demands for small to large cells, Freescale Semiconductor and Texas Instruments are unveiling this week at the Mobile World Congress their respective visions for a “base station on a chip.”
  
  
• 450-mm: The best bargain we've ever had (Thursday Feb. 10, 2011)
  450-mm: I call it a bargain, the best we ever had. It’s been six years since I wrote my popular treatise on 450-mm. Back then I showed that if the industry followed the 300-mm trend, it would take more than $100 billion to develop 450-mm—that was for just the equipment industry and that was the best case. The worst case was wafermageddon: $1 trillion. It was clear that the industry had to do a much better job of things.
  
  
• Momentum Carries MCUs Into 2011 (Thursday Feb. 10, 2011)
  As a whole, MCU market revenues will continue riding the momentum gained in 2010, with a 36.5% growth, to 12% growth in 2011. The region contributing the most to this growth is Asia Pacific, which grew 47.2% in 2010. Driving the growth in Asia Pacific was the Multipurpose segment (Industrial Control).
  
  
• Foundry spending could lead to oversupply (Tuesday Feb. 08, 2011)
  Projected record capital spending by the largest pure-play and IDM foundries in 2011 could result in foundry overcapacity by the end of next year, according to a report by market research firm IC Insights.
  
  
• Cadence exec: EDA needs 'breakaway value' (Thursday Feb. 03, 2011)
  As if EDA companies don't have enough on their plates John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer with Cadence Design Systems, reckons they should be asking chip companies what more they can do to help them be profitable.
  
  
• EDA not yet ready for cloud computing (Thursday Feb. 03, 2011)
  Big EDA companies have their eyes on cloud computing, but there feet are still on the ground, according to a panel discussion at DesignCon here.
  
  
• Xilinx CTO: FPGA can drive the crossover SoC (Thursday Feb. 03, 2011)
  Ivo Bolsens, chief technology officer of field programmable gate array vendor Xilinx Inc., sees a future where FPGAs are a fundamental part of the system-on-chip, either merged monolithically with software programmable microprocessor cores or making use of multi-die configurations in three dimensional system-in-packages.
  
  
• DesignCon: FPGA caveman lag in tools (Wednesday Feb. 02, 2011)
  At DesignCon, FPGA gurus and users attempted to address the issues in a panel, entitled ''FPGA Caveman meets FPGA Chiphead FPGA Design Tools and Methodologies: Can they keep pace?’’
  
  
• 450-mm brings confusion to supply chain (Wednesday Feb. 02, 2011)
  There are an alarming lack of new, leading-edge fabs on the drawing board-a trend that could propel the IC industry into a nightmarish era of tight capacity, higher chip prices and shortages.
  
  
• ARM updates roadmap with Kingfisher, Cygnet (Wednesday Feb. 02, 2011)
  ARM Holdings plc has tipped several additional cores in its roadmap for 2011 during a presentation provided as a background to the company's fourth quarter and full year financial results.
  
  
• Intel has late metal fix for design error (Tuesday Feb. 01, 2011)
  Some more details of a design error in a companion chip to the Sandy Bridge processor – and the fix being implemented – have emerged in a conference call held by Intel with financial analysts to discuss the issue and the impact on Intel's revenues and margins.
  
  
• TSMC tips 450-mm fab (Tuesday Feb. 01, 2011)
  TSMC has disclosed plans that it will build a 450-mm fab, according to an analyst.
  
  
• Rambus CEO sees light in semi growth (Tuesday Feb. 01, 2011)
  In the first DesignCon keynote today here president and chief executive officer of Rambus Inc. painted an optimistic forecast for semiconductors and electronics in general, and of course touted Rambus' IP business model as ideal to produce "one SoC that addresses a broad range of performance levels and price points. "
  
  
• 450-mm fab schedule slips (Tuesday Jan. 25, 2011)
  Despite a sudden surge in fab tool activity for the next-generation wafer size, 450-mm fabs will emerge later than sooner and the production target appears to have slipped.
  
  
• Five IC makers join $3B 'capex club' (Friday Jan. 21, 2011)
  Semiconductor capital spending is expected to hit $59.070 billion in 2011, up 15 percent over 2010, according to IC Insights Inc.
  
  
• Gartner Says Top 10 Original Equipment Manufacturers Accounted for $104.3 Billion of Semiconductor Demand in 2010 (Friday Jan. 21, 2011)
  Leading-brand companies remained at the center of the semiconductor world, accounting for $104.3 billion of semiconductors on a design total available market (TAM)* basis in 2010 — over a third of semiconductor vendors' worldwide chip revenue — according to Gartner, Inc. This was a year-over-year increase of approximately $26.3 billion, up 33.7 percent from 2009.
  
  
• Analyst: TSMC to boost capex (Thursday Jan. 20, 2011)
  Don't look now, but Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) is expected to boost its capital spending for 2011.
  
  
• x86 and MIPS Applications Processors to Challenge ARM’s Smartphone Market Share, According to ABI Research (Monday Jan. 17, 2011)
  ARM-based applications processors currently have a virtual lock on the smartphone market. Traditionally ARM processors have provided the best power efficiency while having comparatively less processing grunt than Intel equivalents, a formula that has worked well for smartphones so far.
  
  
• Despite skeptics, Intel keeps rolling (Monday Jan. 17, 2011)
  Even after reporting its third consecutive record quarter and best sales year ever Thursday (Jan. 13), Intel Corp. continues to take its lumps from critics who see the company's x86-based chips at an increasing disadvantage against ARM-based processors in the mobile computing space.
  
  
• TSMC First Pure-Play Foundry to Join Top-10 R&D Spenders (Friday Jan. 14, 2011)
  The now well known trend of IC manufacturers abandoning the IDM fab business model to become fabless or fab-lite has resulted in, or is the result of, depending on the point of view, the growing prominence of pure-play foundries in IC design, process technology development, and manufacturing.
  
  
• Seven growth opportunities for the chip industry during market upturn (Thursday Jan. 13, 2011)
  The semiconductor industry survived the recent rough recession. In fact, the industry finally learned from past mistakes by turning off the supply spigot faster and more aggressively than in previous downturns as demand plummeted.
  
  
• Analyst: Intel missed mobile boat (Thursday Jan. 13, 2011)
  ARM Holdings plc and Intel Corp. are on a collision course in the systems space. The winner? Intel, according to one analyst. Another analyst disagreed.
  
  
• Foundry capacity glut seen in '11 (Wednesday Jan. 12, 2011)
  The so-called capital spending ''arms race'' in the foundry business will continue, as leading-edge vendors will boost their expenditures in 2011, according to an analyst.
  
  
• Global System-On-a-Chip (SoC) Market to Reach US$39.4 Billion by 2015, According to New Report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc. (Tuesday Jan. 11, 2011)
  GIA announces the release of a comprehensive global report on System-On-a-Chip (SoC). Although the prolonged severity of the recent economic slowdown, and depressed key-end use segments have elicited decline in value sales for System-On-a-Chip (SoC), the market is nevertheless expected to recover poise in the medium-to-long term period and register US$39.4 billion in sales by the year 2015.
  
  
• WSTS cuts $1 billion in chips sales, says Cowan (Monday Jan. 10, 2011)
  In the global chip sales figures for November recently posted by World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS), the organization made downward revisions to all the sales numbers of the previous months of 2010, according to analyst Mike Cowan
  
  
• Analyst: Intel to break ARM (Monday Jan. 10, 2011)
  ARM Holdings plc and Intel Corp. are on a collision course. ARM’s technology has dominated the mobile processor business. Meanwhile, Intel has a near monopoly on the traditional PC and server markets. Now, ARM and its partners—Marvell, Nvidia and others-want a piece of the traditional, x86-based computer segments. And Intel is looking to make inroads in the mobile, tablet PC and related segments dominated by ARM. The winner?
  
  
• Windows on ARM: It's a whole new ballgame (Friday Jan. 07, 2011)
  Mark January 5, 2011 as the date of the big PC earthquake. That's when Steve Ballmer said the next version of Windows will run on ARM and Jen-Hsun Huang made Nvidia the first chip maker to say it will deliver a soup-to-nuts family of ARM chips for computing.
  
  
• Semico's Analysts Make Predictions on 2011 (Wednesday Jan. 05, 2011)
  Semico's analysts have gazed into their crystal ball (or, in some cases, their "Magic 8 Ball" App on their iPad), and have shared with you here their expectations for 2011.
  
  
• Architecture Wars: Staking a Claim in the Nearly 4 Billion Unit Mobile Processor Market (Thursday Dec. 30, 2010)
  Currently, two architectures, ARM and x86 dominate the low and high-end of the mobile market, respectively, and are battling it out for the mid-range convergence devices like e-readers, tablets, and netbooks. However, other architectures, such as MIPS and SH, are equally suited to power mobile SoCs and as more emphasis is placed on the OS and mobile applications, the use of a particular processor architecture or instruction set is likely to become less important.
  
  
• ITC: China's IP enforcement is still lacking (Monday Dec. 27, 2010)
  Enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR) laws still remains a ''serious problem'' in China, according to a new and recent report from the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC).