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Commentary / Analysis

• SEMI Reports 2012 Global Semiconductor Materials Sales of $47.1 Billion (Tuesday Apr. 09, 2013)
  The global semiconductor materials market decreased 2 percent in 2012 compared to 2011 while worldwide semiconductor revenues declined 3 percent. Revenues of $47.11 mark the first decline in the semiconductor materials market in three years.
  
  
• More Than One Fourth of Industry Wafer Capacity Dedicated to <40nm Process Geometries (Thursday Apr. 04, 2013)
  More than one quarter of installed wafer capacity worldwide is dedicated to producing IC devices using process geometries (or feature sizes) smaller than 40nm, according to data in IC Insights’ Global Wafer Capacity 2013
  
  
• TSMC expected to begin 20-nm line early (Thursday Apr. 04, 2013)
  Foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan) is reportedly going to start installing equipment for 20-nm CMOS production at its Fab 14 on April 20, two months earlier than previously planned.
  
  
• Yoshida in China: Imagination dumps MIPS sales team (Thursday Apr. 04, 2013)
  
  
  
• Worldwide Semiconductor Revenue Declined 2.6 Percent in 2012, According to Final Results by Gartner (Wednesday Apr. 03, 2013)
  Total worldwide semiconductor revenue reached $299.9 billion in 2012, down 2.6 percent from 2011, according to Gartner, Inc. With the overall semiconductor market decline, the number of vendors that declined among the top 25 outnumbered those that grew.
  
  
• China fabless: Actions Semi targets 'non-Apple market' (Wednesday Apr. 03, 2013)
  Some see one of China's oldest fabless chip supplier as a shrinking player in the diminishing MP3 player market. Maybe not.
  
  
• Yoshida in China: What's Calxeda doing here? (Tuesday Apr. 02, 2013)
  In Beijing, I ran into Barry Evans, a brain behind the famed Xscale processor SoC, now a co-founder and CEO at Calxeda.
  
  
• Would the real Apple A5 please stand up? (Tuesday Apr. 02, 2013)
  Apple A-5's shrink has less to do with process and more to do with fewer circuits.
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Sales Remain Ahead of 2012 Pace in February (Tuesday Apr. 02, 2013)
  SIA today announced that worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $23.25 billion for the month of February 2013, an increase of 1.4 percent from February 2012 when sales were $22.93 billion.
  
  
• EDA Consortium Reports Revenue Increase for Q4 2012 (Monday Apr. 01, 2013)
  The EDA Consortium (EDAC) Market Statistics Service (MSS) today announced that the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry revenue increased 4.6 percent for Q4 2012 to $1779.1 million, compared to $1700.1 million in Q4 2011.
  
  
• Lenovo to design own chips (Monday Apr. 01, 2013)
  Lenovo, the second largest smartphone supplier in China, will get into the chip design business with a special focus on smartphones and tablets, EE Times has learned.
  
  
• Next ARM CEO's 10 toughest tasks (Thursday Mar. 28, 2013)
  On July 1, Simon Segars is set to become the third CEO in the history of processor licensing vendor ARM Holdings plc. Segars' job is no walk in the park. Despite ARM's success in recent years, the company is fighting high-stakes battles on many fronts.
  
  
• Pure-Play Foundries and Fabless Suppliers are Star Performers in Top 25 2012 Semiconductor Supplier Ranking (Thursday Mar. 28, 2013)
  The top 25 ranking includes three pure-play foundries (TSMC, GlobalFoundries, and UMC) and six fabless companies. In 2012, the pure-play foundries and fabless companies were the star performers.
  
  
• 3-D integration takes spotlight at ISPD (Wednesday Mar. 27, 2013)
  Three-dimensional integration was the focus on the kickoff day for the annual International Symposium on Physical Systems (ISPD), where semiconductor designers worldwide show-off their next-generation aspirations for the physical design of future chips.
  
  
• Global Consumer Electronics Industry Revenue Fell by 2 percent in 2012 (Wednesday Mar. 27, 2013)
  Revenue of the global Consumer Electronics (CE) device industry fell by 2 percent in 2012 to US$729 billion, as the strength in smartphones and tablets were not able to offset broad-based softness in consumer demand for other device segments, according to the latest report from Strategy Analytics.
  
  
• Synopsys bullish despite rising chip complexity (Wednesday Mar. 27, 2013)
  Rick Merritt, EETimes 3/26/2013 1:01 PM EDT SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Transistors may or may not keep getting cheaper, but in either case, the semiconductor industry still has plenty of headroom for growth, said Aart de Geus. The co-chief executive officer of Synopsys is bullish on the industry’s abilities to master FinFETs and double patterning, but cold on 3-D chip stacking. In a keynote and press roundtable at an annual users group meeting here de Geus also vowed to make the Verdi debugger recently acquired with Springsoft the centerpiece of an updated verification offering and to migrate the Eve verification system to run on graphics processors. “Moore’s Law has become irrelevant compared to the impact of new applications,” de Geus told several hundred engineers here. “Even if transistors do not become that much cheaper the demand for more capabilities will continue at breakneck speed and the economics will be there."
  
  
• Intel and Samsung Forecast to Represent 42% of Semiconductor Capital Spending in 2013 (Wednesday Mar. 27, 2013)
  For 2013, the top-10 capital spenders are forecast to increase their spending by 5% as compared to 2012, which would be 13 points better than the results expected from the non-top-10 companies (-8%).
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts February 2013 Book-to-Bill Ratio of 1.10 (Friday Mar. 22, 2013)
  North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.07 billion in orders worldwide in February 2013 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.10, according to the February Book-to-Bill Report published today by SEMI.
  
  
• SMIC's CEO makes utilization first focus (Friday Mar. 22, 2013)
  Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), for the first time in a long time, has a good story to tell.
  
  
• How ST and Renesas blew it on mobile (Thursday Mar. 21, 2013)
  Let’s face it. All along, we knew how this movie would end. The game is over for Western chip companies--except for a sole survivor and the mobile chip industry leader, Qualcomm.
  
  
• China, India outspending U.S. in semiconductors (Wednesday Mar. 20, 2013)
  The governments of China and India will each announce plans to pump billions of dollars into their semiconductor industries this year, said Lip-Bu Tan, the chief executive of Cadence Design Systems Inc. and a veteran investor, bemoaning the decline of U.S. venture capital funding for chips.
  
  
• Nvidia's road map drives graphics, ARM into enterprise (Wednesday Mar. 20, 2013)
  Nvidia showed a glimpse of its road map for taking on Intel and AMD as well as its smartphone competitors at its annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) here. It also showed its graphics chips are breaking out of the mold of media and technical processing to take on business apps.
  
  
• ARM's Segars is safe CEO choice (Wednesday Mar. 20, 2013)
  On the issue of CEO succession – as in many things – ARM has acted in stark contrast to rival semiconductor company Intel.
  
  
• Imagination preps cores for vision processor market (Thursday Mar. 14, 2013)
  Imagination Technologies Group plc has said it is "well advanced" in developing camera-related IP cores that can address growing markets in vision processing.
  
  
• Intel Leads Unexpectedly Large Decline in Semiconductor Market Inventory in Q4 (Thursday Mar. 14, 2013)
  After reaching a worrisome high in the third quarter of 2012, global semiconductor inventories held by chip suppliers fell at a surprisingly fast rate in the fourth quarter, led by dramatic reductions for market leader Intel Corp.
  
  
• PowerVR confirmed in Samung's 'Octa' (Wednesday Mar. 13, 2013)
  Imagination Technologies has confirmed that its PowerVR SGX544MP graphics processing core has the design win inside Samsung's Exynos 5410 "Octa" chip.
  
  
• A look inside Cadence's IP core strategy (Wednesday Mar. 13, 2013)
  Analysts are giving Cadence's bid for Tensilica a cautious thumbs up as it moves into what it claims is a future of more integrated IP and tools for EDA.
  
  
• SEMI Reports 2012 Global Semiconductor Equipment Sales of $36.9 Billion (Wednesday Mar. 13, 2013)
  SEMI today reported that worldwide sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment totaled $36.93 billion in 2012, representing a year-over-year decrease of 15 percent.
  
  
• Cadence guns for Synopsys with Tensilica buy (Tuesday Mar. 12, 2013)
  Cadence Design Systems Inc. Monday (March 11) agreed to acquire dataplane processing IP specialist Tensilica Inc. for about $380 million in cash in a deal that would significantly expand Cadence's IP offerings and put the firm in position to compete head on with archrival Synopsys Inc. in the silicon IP business.
  
  
• January DRAM, NAND Flash Sales Point to Promising Year (Thursday Mar. 07, 2013)
  Industry consolidation to just three big DRAM suppliers and a reduction in capital expenditures among these manufacturers helped propel DRAM average selling prices (ASPs) up 13% year over year in January, which contributed to a 19.9% jump in the total memory market and a 6.2% increase for the total IC market in January 2013.