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Commentary / Analysis

• 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.
  
  
• China Fabless: Going it alone, GigaDevice targets 'no-growth' NOR flash market (Thursday Sep. 20, 2012)
  While most of China's fabless industry is pursuing apps processors, GigaDevice Semiconductor Inc. is targeting a market most have forsaken: NOR flash memory.
  
  
• MIPI Alliance M-PHY Physical Layer Gains Dominant Position for Mobile Device Applications (Thursday Sep. 20, 2012)
  MIPI Alliance today announced its M-PHY low power, scalable physical layer specification is now the preferred data transport interface technology for mobile applications, based on previously announced relationships with JEDEC UFS, PCI-SIG®, USB-IF– and its member adoption rate.
  
  
• The A6: Apple's SoC Design Team Finally Gets Serious (Thursday Sep. 20, 2012)
  Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Apple's iPhone 5, unveiled last Wednesday, isn't the information that the company disclosed at the launch event itself but what's subsequently come to light in the last few days.
  
  
• Long-Term Forecast Improves for IC Market (Wednesday Sep. 19, 2012)
  The market for integrated circuits is forecast to post much stronger average annual growth through 2021 compared to the average market growth over the past 15 years, according to an analysis recently completed by IC Insights
  
  
• iPhone 5 Carries $199 BOM, Virtual Teardown Reveals (Wednesday Sep. 19, 2012)
  The new iPhone 5 carries a bill of materials (BOM) of $199.00 for the low-end model with 16Gbytes of NAND flash memory, according to a preliminary virtual teardown conducted by the IHS iSuppli Teardown Analysis Service.
  
  
• Renesas: Software is new battlefront in MCUs (Tuesday Sep. 18, 2012)
  The battlefront among microcontroller makers is shifting up the stack as vendors wrap their silicon in middleware, said a Renesas executive in a wide ranging interview just prior to the opening of Design East here.
  
  
• China Fabless: Resurgent Spreadtrum looks to expand (Tuesday Sep. 18, 2012)
  Spreadtrum Communications has emerged as one of China's hottest fabless companies, along with RDA Microelectronics, prompting talk here of a potential merger between the two.
  
  
• Predictable semiconductor cycle ahead? (Tuesday Sep. 18, 2012)
  Despite the increasingly negative predictions of semiconductor forecasters, predictable change in the semiconductor industry comes from monitoring capital investment. From this, we can predict the supply side of the supply/demand balance. Macro-economic factors tend to drive the demand side and these are currently uncertain.
  
  
• The iPhone 5's A6 SoC: Not A15 or A9, a Custom Apple Core Instead (Monday Sep. 17, 2012)
  When Apple announced the iPhone 5, Phil Schiller officially announced what had leaked several days earlier: the phone is powered by Apple's new A6 SoC.
  
  
• Kalray claims 25 customers for 256-core processor (Monday Sep. 17, 2012)
  Kalray SA, the well-supported French launching a parallel processing chip and software, has 25 customers and is hopeful of winning more in Germany and Japan, according to CEO Joel Monnier.
  
  
• Intel's Haswell: a viable platform for tablets? (Monday Sep. 17, 2012)
  Recently at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), EE Times had the opportunity to sit down one to one with Intel’s executive vice president, David (Dadi) Perlmutter, general manager of the firm’s architecture group.
  
  
• China IP debate: "Everyone's afraid their tech will be stolen..." (Monday Sep. 17, 2012)
  China wants Western technology. It also wants to export its own technology to the West. The key question is whether the rest of the world will be willing to go along given the widely held belief that China is the "knockoff capital of the universe."
  
  
• Intel describes 22-nm SoC process, not chips (Friday Sep. 14, 2012)
  Intel provided the first look at the system-on-chip variant of its 22-nm process technology in a talk at the Intel Developer Forum here Thursday (Sept. 13). However, it declined to provide details on the Atom-based SoCs for tablets and smartphones that will be made in that process.