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Commentary / Analysis

• Report: Renesas Mobile up for sale in re-org (Tuesday Jun. 19, 2012)
  Renesas Mobile Corp., the mobile chip company subsidiary of struggling Renesas Electronics Corp., could be put up for sale as part of a previously reported re-organization.
  
  
• The fabless-foundry model will survive (at least through 14-nm) (Monday Jun. 18, 2012)
  In a rebuttal to comments made earlier this year by Intel's Mark Bohr, Handel Jones of IBS argues that the fabless-foundry model will be around for a while.
  
  
• Apple and Samsung Garner 50% of Global Smartphone Market and 90% of Its Profits (Monday Jun. 18, 2012)
  Although smartphone shipments grew 41% year-over-year to 144.6 million as of the quarter ending March 2012, many smartphone OEMs are not enjoying the benefits of a rapidly expanding market. Samsung and Apple captured 55% of global smartphone shipments in 1Q’2012 and over 90% of the market’s profits. The question remains: can anyone break away to become a strong third in this market?
  
  
• Nokia job cuts don't and won't impress anyone (Thursday Jun. 14, 2012)
  The announcement earlier today by Nokia Corp. that it will eliminate one of every five jobs in its mobile handset division and remove three senior executives didn't impress investors who promptly dumped the stock, driving down the company's market value by more than 15 percent in intraday trading.
  
  
• Nokia to cut 10,000 jobs, divest assets (Thursday Jun. 14, 2012)
  Nokia Corp. has replaced three senior executives, including the head of its mobile phone division. And it plans to reduce payroll by up to 10,000 as it struggles to restore profitability and improve its competitive position against companies like Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (Korea: SEC).
  
  
• Interview: JEDEC on LPDDR3 (Thursday Jun. 14, 2012)
  In response to surging bandwidth demand from the mobile device market, the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association just released LPDDR3, a new mobile memory standard that boasts a data rate of 1600 Mbps. We sat down with Hung Vuong, Chairman of JEDEC’s JC-42.6 Subcommittee for Low Power Memories to talk about the new standard, memory challenges, and what comes next.
  
  
• ARM improves its image in graphics (Wednesday Jun. 13, 2012)
  ARM has been doing better at shipping graphics cores than it has been given credit for, according to Jem Davies, ARM Fellow and vice president of technology for the media processing division.
  
  
• ARM fills in GPU line with Mali-450 (Tuesday Jun. 12, 2012)
  ARM has provided some details of the Mali-450, a graphics processor based on ARM's Utgard architecture.
  
  
• SEMI Reports First Quarter 2012 Worldwide Semiconductor Equipment Figures; Billings US$ 10.6 Billion (Tuesday Jun. 12, 2012)
  SEMI today reported that worldwide semiconductor manufacturing equipment billings reached US$ 10.61 billion in the first quarter of 2012. The billings figure is 14 percent higher than the fourth quarter of 2011 and 9 percent lower higher than the same quarter a year ago.
  
  
• ARM still struggling with Win 8 devices (Tuesday Jun. 12, 2012)
  By all accounts, this year’s Computex Taipei wasn’t an earth shattering event. No major news, and no huge announcements, though there were a steady slew of new Ultrabook designs from Asus, Acer and Toshiba.
  
  
• Report: Taiwan approves TSMC's 450-mm fab plan (Monday Jun. 11, 2012)
  The Taiwan government has a approved a proposal from foundry chip company Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. to build a 450-mm wafer fab in central Taiwan early in 2014, according to a Reuters report.
  
  
• Room for IC industry expansion, analyst says (Monday Jun. 11, 2012)
  The IC industry growth will grow over the next ten years, said Bill McClean, CEO of IC Insights (Scottsdale, Ariz.)., at the recent IMEC Technology Forum at the Square meeting center in Brussels, Belgium.
  
  
• Samsung to spend $1.9 billion on logic fab, says report (Thursday Jun. 07, 2012)
  Consumer equipment giant Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has said it will spend $1.9 billion building a wafer fab line for logic chips in support of smartphones and tablet computers, according to a Reuters report.
  
  
• EuroFab450 is an ambitious dream (Thursday Jun. 07, 2012)
  Malcolm Penn, CEO of technology and market analysis company Future Horizons Ltd. believes in the importance of retaining control of manufacturing passionately. He has many times spoken of the fab-lite business model as a being merely the reprehensible and drawn-out process of abandoning manufacturing.
  
  
• DAC panel spotlights rise of IP subsystems (Thursday Jun. 07, 2012)
  Intellectual property (IP) reuse in SoC design is increasing, creating challenges in compatibility and complexity, according to executives on a Design Automation Conference (DAC) panel. To minimize this complexity, panelists said, the semiconductor industry will increasingly turn to IP subsystems—larger chunks of IP that have been stitched together from many smaller blocks and pre-verified to ensure performance.
  
  
• Intel makes flow processor with ARM inside (Wednesday Jun. 06, 2012)
  Netronome Systems has announced details of the NFP-6xxx family of flow processors, which operate at up to 200-Gbits per second. The chips are made using Intel's 22-nm FinFET manufacturing process technology. Netronome claims they provide more than six times the packet processing performance at less than half the power of alternatives made using 28-nm CMOS.
  
  
• European report considers 450-mm More-than-Moore fab (Wednesday Jun. 06, 2012)
  A report prepared for the European Commission just published discusses the potential role of European authorities in encouraging the creation of both a pilot 450-mm wafer fab to support Europe's chip equipment companies and a volume manufacturing 450-mm plant for a wide variety of More-than-Moore processes.
  
  
• Fab Equipment Spending: Positive Growth for 2012 and 2013; All-Time Record for 2013 (Wednesday Jun. 06, 2012)
  Breaking the barrier into positive growth for 2012, the end-of-May edition of the SEMI World Fab Forecast shows improved growth in fab equipment spending this year — at US$ 39.5 billion, a two percent year-over-year (YoY) increase.
  
  
• Rising Semiconductor Inventories in Q1 Signal Potential Recovery in Demand (Wednesday Jun. 06, 2012)
  Semiconductor stockpiles held by chip suppliers increased during the first quarter of 2012, but the rise in inventory for a second straight quarter was driven by the anticipation of higher demand from customers, according to an IHS iSuppli Inventory Insider Market Brief report from information and analytics provider IHS
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Sales Grow at Fastest Rate in Almost Two Years on Sequential Monthly Basis, Top $24 Billion for First Time in 2012 (Wednesday Jun. 06, 2012)
  The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) today announced that worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $24.1 billion for the month of April 2012, a 3.4 percent increase from the prior month when sales were $23.3 billion. This marks the largest month-over-month growth for the industry since May 2010.
  
  
• Four reasons why its 'game over' for foreign chip firms in China (Wednesday Jun. 06, 2012)
  Multinational semiconductor companies are no longer able to compete with China’s fabless chips vendors in the consumer electronics IC business, according to Vincent Tai, CEO of RDA Microelectronics Inc. “It’s game over” for them, Tai asserted in a recent interview with EE Times here.
  
  
• Synopsys exec sees whole new ball game at 20 nm (Tuesday Jun. 05, 2012)
  The requirement for lithography double patterning on many layers makes moving to the 20-nm node a major undertaking that will require customers to invest in new design tool sets, according to Saleem Haider, senior director of marketing for physical design and DFM at Synopsys Inc.
  
  
• GloFo, TSMC report process tech progress (Tuesday Jun. 05, 2012)
  Globalfoundries reported progress ramping four flavors of its 28nm process and early work qualifying its 20 nm process and developing 3-D IC technology at the Design Automation Conference here. Its larger competitor TSMC also announced progress in the same three areas working in collaboration with Cadence Design Systems.
  
  
• Gary Smith hails multi-platform design methodology (Monday Jun. 04, 2012)
  design methodology based largely on intellectual property (IP) reuse employing minimal new design work to add proprietary value is being used by chip firms to create high-end system-on-chips (SoCs) with significantly lower costs, according to veteran EDA analyst Gary Smith.
  
  
• Insufficient baseband chip supply hurting LTE smartphone sales (Thursday May. 31, 2012)
  Since there has been greater than originally expected demand for LTE (Long Term Evolution) smartphones (and tablets), international vendors, including Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and HTC are worried that their shipments are not enough to meet demand due to short supply of LTE solution chips from Qualcomm, currently the only provider of integrated multimode 3G/4G LTE baseband chips.
  
  
• Why chip makers are buying software firms (Thursday May. 31, 2012)
  The owners of embedded software companies have long considered an acquisition by a semiconductor partner a logical exit strategy. We took a look at semiconductor acquisitions over the past two years with the aim of better understanding the dynamics of the market, and we came up with four critical questions.
  
  
• Renesas cuts 14,000 jobs; fab sale to TSMC (Monday May. 28, 2012)
  Renesas Electronics Corp. plans to eliminate up to 14,000 jobs, while selling the company’s leading system-chip fab in Yamagata to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., according to a report in Nikkei, Japan’s economic newspaper.
  
  
• Reports: Renesas to tie up with TSMC, cut jobs (Thursday May. 24, 2012)
  Renesas Electronics Corp., Japan's largest maker of logic chips, is expected to announce business partnership with foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. for the production of chips on Monday (May 28), according to reports.
  
  
• ARM CTO looks at architecture scaling for 2020 solutions (Thursday May. 24, 2012)
  Anticipating the propagation of the Internet of things, Mike Muller, chief technology officer at ARM Ltd., discussed the needs for architecture scaling at the annual IMEC Technology Forum this week at the Square meeting center in Brussels, Belgium.
  
  
• One Counterfeit Part Every 15 Seconds (Tuesday May. 22, 2012)
  More than 12 million parts have been involved in counterfeit incidents during the period spanning the start of 2007 through April 2012, according to Rory King, director, supply chain product marketing at IHS, citing data from ERAI. King delivered the news here on Friday to an audience of electronics industry participants attending the ERAI Executive Conference, co-hosted by IHS.