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Commentary / Analysis

• Splitting Sony Won't Restore Its Future (Friday Aug. 02, 2013)
  Sony posted net income of 3.5 billion yen (US$35 million) in the quarter that ended June 30, after a loss of 24.6 billion yen in the quarter a year earlier
  
  
• Lawsuits Drive Patent Market (Friday Aug. 02, 2013)
  A market for buying and selling patents is emerging as companies file more patents and get hit with more infringement suits, said a panel of experts at a lunch event sponsored by the Silicon Valley Chapter of the Licensing Executives Society.
  
  
• OEM Chip Spending to Climb 4 Percent This Year after Flat 2012 (Thursday Aug. 01, 2013)
  The world’s top electronic brands are set to expend $265.2 billion this year on a wide range of semiconductors for devices like smartphones and tablets, with increasingly contentious rivals Samsung Electronics and Apple Inc. again in a tussle to claim the title of biggest spender
  
  
• What if Samsung Exynos Goes ARM Architectural? (Wednesday Jul. 31, 2013)
  It seems that Cortex-A series processor cores, even when harnessed up in a big-little configuration, are no longer good enough to form the heart of application processors in mobile equipment. Effectively, Apple and Qualcomm have raised the stakes by going ARM architectural, and it seems others must follow suit or potentially face a power-performance penalty.
  
  
• Is Moore's Law Dead? Does It Matter? (Wednesday Jul. 31, 2013)
  Most of the time when I hear an end-of-the-world story, I just roll my eyes and move on. However, I heard a message at DAC this year that still has me thinking.
  
  
• IDC Forecasts Worldwide Semiconductor Revenue Will Grow 6.9% and Reach $320 Billion in 2013 (Tuesday Jul. 30, 2013)
  Semiconductor revenue worldwide will see improved growth this year of 6.9% and reaching $320 billion according to the mid-year 2013 update of the Semiconductor Applications Forecaster (SAF) from International Data Corporation (IDC).
  
  
• The Love Triangle: Do EDA Services, Tools & IP Mix? (Monday Jul. 29, 2013)
  It has been tried before: An EDA company, which usually licenses software as a design tool, believes it can create a circuit design in its services group for one company and then repackage and sell it as IP.
  
  
• Fab lite, Design lite (Wednesday Jul. 24, 2013)
  Is there a major business model change about to hit the semiconductor industry? Maybe we should start talking about design-lite companies...
  
  
• Foreign IC Companies to Represent 70% of China's IC Production in 2017, Up From 58% in 2012 (Wednesday Jul. 24, 2013)
  Although China has been the largest individual market for ICs since 2005, it does not necessarily mean that large increases in IC production within China would immediately follow, or ever follow.
  
  
• Intel Tips Custom and 14nm Server Chips (Tuesday Jul. 23, 2013)
  Intel's server group has started developing custom CPUs and will roll out as early as next year its first system-on-chip using its Core processor, a 14nm chip.
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts June 2013 Book-to-Bill Ratio of 1.10 (Monday Jul. 22, 2013)
  North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.33 billion in orders worldwide in June 2013 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.10.
  
  
• IP Software Integration Left Out in the Cold (Monday Jul. 22, 2013)
  One thing that has been happening in the IP market is that the average block size has been getting larger. In the early days of reuse, blocks were fairly small, but today many IP blocks are complete subsystems carrying an extensive amount of software. I asked about the ease with which that software can be integrated. Below are the answers I received
  
  
• How ARM's Cortex-A7 Beats the A15 (Friday Jul. 19, 2013)
  ARM's Cortex-A series of processors has now divided into three tiers associated with low, medium, and high performance. The high tier is optimized for performance, and the low tier is optimized for stripped-down power efficiency at lower absolute performance levels, all in support of the big-little and heterogeneous multicore processing.
  
  
• RapidIO Nudges ARM Into Servers (Thursday Jul. 18, 2013)
  RapidIO is poised to leap from wireless base stations to datacenters as an enabler of everything from greener supercomputers to ARM-based microservers. The effort could fuel the move into datacenter systems for ARM-based SoCs, many of which use or plan to adopt RapidIO.
  
  
• The ARM Diaries, Part 2: Understanding the Cortex A12 (Thursday Jul. 18, 2013)
  Before we get into discussions of specific cores, it’s important to talk about ARM’s portfolio as a whole. In the PC space we’re used to focusing on Intel’s latest and greatest microarchitectures, which are then scaled in various ways to hit lower price targets.
  
  
• Big Gains Forecast in Quarterly DRAM ASP (Wednesday Jul. 17, 2013)
  DRAM average selling prices (ASPs) have increased every month throughout 2013 and are now at levels last seen in October 2010, according to data in IC Insights’ Mid-Year Update to The McClean Report.
  
  
• Apple, Samsung Reportedly Ink 14-nm Foundry Deal (Tuesday Jul. 16, 2013)
  South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. will build 14-nm processors for future Apple Inc. iPhones and iPads under the terms of a deal signed over the weekend, according to a report by the Korea Economic Daily.
  
  
• M-PCIe - Goin' mobile! (Tuesday Jul. 16, 2013)
  Like everything else in Silicon Valley, PCIe (peripheral component interconnect express) is goin’ mobile (cue up The Who). The big news at the June PCIe Special Interest Group Developers Conference was “mobile express,” M-PCIe.
  
  
• Why GlobalFoundries Should Appeal to Apple (Monday Jul. 15, 2013)
  There is speculation that negotiations around the supply of processors to Apple now include GlobalFoundries Inc.
  
  
• Industry View: Doug Wong of Toshiba on the Future of Memory (Monday Jul. 15, 2013)
  The memory industry is in a time of historic change. The shift from PCs to mobile/tablet computing platforms is driving a shift toward NAND flash, and next-generation technologies loom on the horizon. We took the opportunity to talk with Douglas Wong, senior member of the technical staff for Toshiba America Electronic Components, to get his take on key challenges in the memory space and how Toshiba plans to address them.
  
  
• Has Intel Really Beaten ARM? (Wednesday Jul. 10, 2013)
  There has been a considerable amount of press around recent AnTuTu benchmark results and a recent ABI Research report claiming, "Intel apps processor [the Atom Z2580] outperforms Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Samsung."
  
  
• Memory and Foundry Account For More Than Half of Worldwide IC Capacity (Wednesday Jul. 10, 2013)
  At the end of 2012, memory products and foundries accounted for a combined 54% of the IC industry’s installed monthly capacity of 14,497K wafers (200mm-equivalent wafers)
  
  
• SEMI Sees 21% Increase in Chip Equipment Spending for 2014 (Tuesday Jul. 09, 2013)
  SEMI forecasts semiconductor equipment sales will reach $43.98 billion in 2014, a 21 percent increase over estimated 2013 equipment spending.
  
  
• ARM's Lead Engineer Discusses Inexact Processing (Monday Jul. 08, 2013)
  Richard Grisenthwaite, lead processor architect with ARM, has said the company has thought about creating an inexact processor -- a processor that curtails precision to save power. The technique has echoes of fuzzy logic and probabilistic processing and uses reduced accuracy of multiplication and addition but manages the probability of errors building up.
  
  
• Will Your UHDTV Chip Decode Every HEVC Bit Stream? (Wednesday Jul. 03, 2013)
  Is the semiconductor industry prepared to profit from the emerging 4K UHDTV market? If so, how ready is anyone?
  
  
• India Fab Infected by Delay Bug (Wednesday Jul. 03, 2013)
  A fab amidst chaos... that's what India is planning, and delaying as usual. The deadline given by the Empowered Committee to give an answer was June 30, but a deafening silence continues to come from the red-carpeted corridors of power.
  
  
• Installed Capacity for 300mm Wafer Processing Forecast to Rise to 70% of Total Capacity by 2017 (Wednesday Jul. 03, 2013)
  Since 2008, the majority of integrated circuit production has taken place on 300mm wafers. In terms of surface area shipped (i.e., on a normalized 200mm-equivalent wafer basis), 300mm wafers represented 56% of worldwide installed capacity in December 2012
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Sales Jump by Largest Margin in Over Three Years (Monday Jul. 01, 2013)
  SIA today announced that worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $24.70 billion for the month of May 2013, an increase of 4.6 percent from the previous month when sales were $23.62 billion.
  
  
• ARM vs. Imagination Goes to Video (Monday Jul. 01, 2013)
  We are used to processor IP companies ARM and Imagination battling to gain design wins for their CPU and GPU cores, but now the contest has moved into the realm of video rendering.
  
  
• Intel and ARM Entering a Price War? (Monday Jul. 01, 2013)
  One of the largest investing stories over the last several years is the decline of the PC and the rise of mobile computing. One of the companies with the most to lose is Intel