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Commentary / Analysis

• Europe must not exit chip business, says SEMI (Wednesday Oct. 10, 2012)
  Europe's leading chip companies must join forces to compete in the investment-intensive semiconductor business, according to Heinz Kundert, president of the Europe branch of industry association SEMI.
  
  
• Telecom Segments Forecast to Lead Top-Growing IC Markets in 2012 (Wednesday Oct. 10, 2012)
  Though overall IC market growth is expected to decline 1% in 2012, nine product categories are expected to show positive growth. Leading the way are three categories related to the telecom industry.
  
  
• U.S. warns telcos not to buy gear from Chinese firms (Tuesday Oct. 09, 2012)
  A U.S. Congressional committee Monday (Oct. 8) warned American operators not to buy equipment from China's leading telecom equipment makers, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and ZTE Corp., citing potential risk to U.S. national security interests.
  
  
• Moore's Law threatened by lithography woes (Monday Oct. 08, 2012)
  Moore's Law, the engine of semiconductor innovation for decades, is losing steam due to delayed introduction of next-generation extreme ultraviolet lithography.
  
  
• Globalfoundries' 14-nm is 'low-shrink' node (Monday Oct. 08, 2012)
  The 14XM FinFET manufacturing process node being introduced by Globalfoundries Inc. for volume production in 2014 is aimed at reducing power consumption, but it will provide users with little or no size reduction over the previous 20-nm planar bulk CMOS node.
  
  
• Achronix shifts gears, offers FPGA IP for SoCs (Friday Oct. 05, 2012)
  Fabless FPGA vendor Achronix Semiconductor Corp. has jumped into the SoC market by offering to license its FPGA technology to chip companies.
  
  
• Smartphone Apps Processor Growth Lifts Broadcom, MediaTek and ST-Ericsson in 1H 2012 (Friday Oct. 05, 2012)
  Global smartphone applications processor market showed a robust 61 percent year-on-year growth in 1H 2012 to reach $5.5 billion, according to the Strategy Analytics Handset Component Technologies service report.
  
  
• Semiconductor Foundries Enjoyed Strong Q2, but Slowdown Looms (Thursday Oct. 04, 2012)
  Pure-play foundry semiconductor manufacturers enjoyed a robust second quarter following the enthusiastic consumer purchasing of wireless products like mobile handsets and tablets, but the industry is slowing down in the second half of 2012 as economic tremors roil the supply chain.
  
  
• 4G Intellectual Property Royalties Set to Quadruple over the Next Five Years (Thursday Oct. 04, 2012)
  Royalties raised from 4G cellular technologies in 2017 will be quadruple that of 2012, reaching over $6B in 2017. This correlates with the growth of 4G devices and is dominated by handsets.
  
  
• Slideshow: Facebook remakes the server (Thursday Oct. 04, 2012)
  Facebook showed EETimes its first working prototype of Open Rack, an energy efficient server that's intended to power data centers which can theoretically scale to more than 100,000 physical machines.
  
  
• IDMs Rapidly Transitioning Logic Production to Foundries (Thursday Oct. 04, 2012)
  Arguably, no other trend has so quickly swept through the IC industry and stirred up so much debate about the future of chip making as the spread of “fab-lite” (or “asset-lite”) business models, which are being embraced by a growing number of major IDMs worldwide.
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Sales Remain Flat in August (Wednesday Oct. 03, 2012)
  SIA today announced that worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $24.30 billion for the month of August 2012, a slight increase of 0.1 percent from the previous month when sales were $24.27 billion and a 3.2 percent decrease from the August 2011 total of $25.1 billion.
  
  
• EDA Consortium Reports Revenue Increase for Q2, 2012 (Tuesday Oct. 02, 2012)
  The EDA Consortium (EDAC) Market Statistics Service (MSS) today announced that the EDA industry revenue increased 10.8 percent for Q2 2012 to $1593.0 million, compared to $1438.1 million in Q2 2011.
  
  
• Gartner Says Worldwide Wafer Fab Equipment Spending to Decline 13.3 Percent in 2012 (Monday Oct. 01, 2012)
  Worldwide wafer fab equipment (WFE) spending is on pace to total $31.4 billion in 2012, a decline of 13.3 percent from 2011 spending of $36.2 billion, according to Gartner, Inc.
  
  
• Will China bury its bad IP past? (Monday Oct. 01, 2012)
  China is big. China is not homogeneous. It has a poor record of protecting intellectual property. But it also has plenty of government funding at the central, provincial and municipal levels to go along with a massive domestic market for new technologies and products.
  
  
• Technology Trends: DDR4 first look (Friday Sep. 28, 2012)
  Some seven years after launching development of DDR4, JEDEC has officially released the new standard (JESD79-4). With the announcement, we thought it was a good opportunity to sit down with Todd Farrell, chairman of the JC-42.3C Subcommittee for DRAM Timing and director of technical marketing at Micron, to learn more.
  
  
• Cisco chip exec sees steady ASIC investments (Thursday Sep. 27, 2012)
  Competitors of Cisco Systems have been talking smack lately, claiming the router giant is increasingly turning to off-the-shelf chips instead of building its own ASICs. Not so, says one of the router and switch giants top silicon honchos in an exclusive interview with EE Times.
  
  
• TI steering OMAP to embedded (Thursday Sep. 27, 2012)
  Executives from Texas Instruments Inc. said Tuesday (Sept. 25) the company would shift its R&D investment on the OMAP applications processor to focus more on the embedded market and less on smartphones and media tablets.
  
  
• DRAM Content Rises and Becomes More Uniform in Smartphones (Thursday Sep. 27, 2012)
  The average amount of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) in each smartphone shipped worldwide is expected to surge by nearly 50 percent this year, as these advanced cellphones gain greater functionality, according to an IHS iSuppli DRAM Dynamics Market Brief from information and analytics provider IHS.
  
  
• Profits at Stake in IC Foundries' Push for Leading-Edge Technology (Wednesday Sep. 26, 2012)
  Before GlobalFoundries entered the IC foundry market, TSMC was by far the technology leader among the major pure-play IC foundries. In 2012, about 37% of TSMC’s revenue is expected to come from ≤45nm processing. As expected, with GlobalFoundries’ fabs producing AMD’s MPUs over the past few years, its processing technology is skewed toward leading-edge feature sizes.
  
  
• China Fabless: Rockchip rattled by Android tablet wars (Wednesday Sep. 26, 2012)
  Just nine months ago, Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics, a developer of apps processor for tablets, looked almost invincible. The company introduced itself at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as China’s next rock star. “The sky is the limit,” Rockchip’s proclaimed in a press release.
  
  
• Intel, rivals gird for IC manufacturing showdown (Tuesday Sep. 25, 2012)
  Chip giant Intel and the research partnership clustered around IBM and STMicroelectronics are each set to report progress on their approaches to leading-edge IC manufacturing during the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco in December.
  
  
• Touchstone CEO eyes Linear, Maxim, disruption (Tuesday Sep. 25, 2012)
  In the summer of 2011, a lone semiconductor startup went "old school," as my colleague Dylan McGrath put it. That's when he wrote about Touchstone Semiconductor getting $12 million in venture funding, poised to make a splash in--of all markets--analog components.
  
  
• Contract Manufacturers Make About Nine Out of 10 Media Tablets in 2012 (Tuesday Sep. 25, 2012)
  Although your new media tablet may sport the logo of a familiar brand name like Apple or Amazon, there’s a 90 percent chance the device was actually made by a company with a much less famous moniker, such as Hon Hai or Quanta.
  
  
• Fujitsu said to want out of chip business (Monday Sep. 24, 2012)
  Information and communications technology company Fujitsu Ltd. (Tokyo, Japan) has hired Swiss financial services firm UBS AG to help with the sale of its semiconductor business, according to a Bloomberg report, which cited unnamed sources.
  
  
• Intel plans to crush ARM beyond 20-nm (Monday Sep. 24, 2012)
  Though ARM may currently have an indisputable advantage in low power processing, Intel believes it could eventually take the lead if it maintains its current pace of advancement in process technology.
  
  
• Teardown: Inside Apple's iPhone 5 (Monday Sep. 24, 2012)
  Analysis by UBM TechInsights finds Apple largely stuck with incumbent suppliers.
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts August 2012 Book-to-Bill Ratio of 0.84 (Monday Sep. 24, 2012)
  North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.12 billion in orders worldwide in August 2012 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 0.84, according to the August Book-to-Bill Report published today by SEMI.
  
  
• Apple A6 processor has landed, sort of (Monday Sep. 24, 2012)
  Speculation around the design of the A6 processor at the core of the iPhone 5 has reached a fever pitch in the last few days. All that I have seen so far focuses on particular variants of the CPU and GPU. One might even say these cores are the whole discussion.
  
  
• Could Apple's A6 be a 'big-little' processor? (Friday Sep. 21, 2012)
  There has been speculation as to whether the Apple A6 processor contains a dual-core Cortex-A15 licensed from ARM or a custom dual-core developed by Apple under an ARM architectural license.