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Commentary / Analysis

• Analyst sees ARM CPUs in most netbooks by 2012 (Tuesday Mar. 10, 2009)
  ARM-based processors will take market share from Intel Corp.'s Atom in the netbook segment and hold 55 percent of the netbook market by 2012, according to Robert Castellano, president of The Information Network.
  
  
• Interview: IEC Executive Perspectives DesignCon 2009 with Xerxes Wania, President and CEO, Sidense Corp. (Monday Mar. 09, 2009)
  Sidense with Xerxes Wania, President and CEO.
  
  
• Software a hurdle for ARM-based netbook hopefuls (Friday Mar. 06, 2009)
  Qualcomm and other vendors are using ARM-based processors to try to muscle their way into the netbook market, where Intel's Atom dominates. How quickly and to what degree these devices will be able to capture netbook market share depends largely on consumer demand for the familiar user experience offered by Windows XP.
  
  
• Analysis: Intel, ARM seen on collision course (Tuesday Mar. 03, 2009)
  Heading towards a collision course with ARM Holdings plc in the embedded world, Intel Corp. for the first time will transfer a processor technology outside to a silicon foundry.
  
  
• The Linley Group Reports Processor IP Shipments to Double By 2012 (Friday Feb. 27, 2009)
  Highlighting the processor intellectual property (IP) market as a growth opportunity for the semiconductor industry, The Linley Group today noted that chip designers will continue to reduce cost and time-to-market by purchasing third-party IP instead of developing the technology in-house and forecasts the market will more than double by 2012.
  
  
• Gartner Says Worldwide Semiconductor Revenue On Pace to Decline 24 Percent in 2009 (Wednesday Feb. 25, 2009)
  The impact of the financial crisis will result in the semiconductor industry experiencing near record revenue declines in 2009, according to Gartner, Inc. Worldwide semiconductor revenue is forecast to reach $194.5 billion in 2009, a 24.1 percent decline from 2008 revenue.
  
  
• Interview: ST-Ericsson CEO Alain Dutheil on the LTE rollout (Monday Feb. 23, 2009)
  It was touch and go for a while, but the legal and financial folks sorted out the details in time for ST-Ericsson to make its debut here last week at the Mobile World Congress.
  
  
• Analysis: Will Synopsys take over the world? (Monday Feb. 23, 2009)
  EDA and IP vendor Synopsys Inc. has momentum, and its major competitors in EDA have been reporting losses for several consecutive quarters. Synopsys says its relative strength will buttress trends that have been working in the company's favor, driving even more marketshare its way.
  
  
• Luminary declines to license ARM's tiny core (Monday Feb. 23, 2009)
  Luminary Micro Inc. (Austin, Texas) has declined to license ARM's 12,000 gate processor core for microcontrollers known as Cortex-M0.
  
  
• TSMC executives reach consensus on recovery, says report (Monday Feb. 23, 2009)
  Foundry chip supplier Taiwan TSMC has reached an internal consensus that the semiconductor industry will hit a minimum of trading activity in the first quarter and that a U-shaped recovery is possible during the rest of 2009.
  
  
• Viewpoint: Consolidation is all about timing (Thursday Feb. 19, 2009)
  It's time to shift the thought paradigm from "What fabs do I have today, and how do I fill them?" to "What fab base do I need five years from now and how do I get there?"
  
  
• ST-Ericsson fails to produce promised Symbian-on-A9 demo (Tuesday Feb. 17, 2009)
  ST-Ericsson's previously heralded demonstration of the Symbian operating system running on a dual-core Cortex-A9 processor platform did not, after all, make it to the Mobile World Congress or even to Barcelona.
  
  
• CEO Interview: Moshe Gavrielov of Xilinx (Thursday Feb. 12, 2009)
  Moshe Gavrielov, the relatively new CEO of Xilinx Inc., came to London to launch Xilinx's Spartan-6 and Virtex-6 ranges of FPGAs and to spread a little celebration around the world " celebration of Xilinx's 25th birthday.
  
  
• Rumor mill: UMC to join IBM 'fab club'? (Thursday Feb. 12, 2009)
  Rumors at ISSCC and other events are that Taiwan foundry vendor United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) is mulling over plans to join IBM's ''fab club.'
  
  
• Analysis: Dell has dragged the Linux-ARM Trojan horse inside the Wintel PC (Thursday Feb. 12, 2009)
  The idea of adding smartphone capability to the conventional notebook PC may seem like a bit of a gimmick at first sight. But the idea of doing email and other basic operations while increasing battery life by a factor of ten compared with the same operations on an Intel processor certainly appeals.
  
  
• ESL: Where are we and where are we going (Monday Feb. 09, 2009)
  Electronic System Level (ESL) design is a 21st century phenomenon. Although other disciplines that have used computer-aided-design methods have done system-level design for years, electronic designers have begun to employ this method only recently. From the very beginning of the industrial semiconductor era, now over fifty years old, engineers have paid more attention to structures in silicon than to system architecture. Methods have grown bottom-up, from mylar strips to gates, to registers, to functional blocks. EDA tools have naturally followed the same evolution.
  
  
• Analysis: Plug-and-play IP goal remains elusive (Monday Feb. 09, 2009)
  Intellectual property (IP) was a hot topic at the DesignCon show here last week, with frustration over the quality of IP and business models that are described as immature being knocked more than once.
  
  
• eSilicon CEO sees new ASIC landscape (Monday Feb. 09, 2009)
  The current IC downturn has already taken its toll on the semiconductor industry in 2009. One semiconductor and EDA veteran sees a ray of hope.
  
  
• Video: USB 3.0 and power tool at DesignCon (Wednesday Feb. 04, 2009)
  Silicon blocks for the emerging USB 3.0 interface and software tools to ease the job of power integrity design grabbed my attention on the show floor at DesignCon. Stephane Hauradou, co-founder and chief technology officer of PLDA Inc., gave a demo of his USB 3.0 block running in an FPGA with throughput of about 3.5 Gbits/s.
  
  
• Analysis: What's the future of IBM Micro? (Monday Feb. 02, 2009)
  IBM Corp.'s move last week to implement layoffs within its semiconductor unit follows a dramatic slump in sales, product setbacks and numerous false starts in the sector.
  
  
• EDA Consortium Reports Industry Revenue Down in Third Quarter 2008 (Monday Jan. 12, 2009)
  The EDA Consortium (EDAC) Market Statistics Service (MSS) today announced that the electronic design automation (EDA) industry revenue for Q3 2008 declined 10.9 percent to $1258.6 million compared to $1412.1 million in Q3 2007. The four-quarter moving average declined 2.8 percent. Note that revenue numbers which include Q1 and Q2 2008 reflect a restatement of those numbers.
  
  
• Report: Startups caught in cash squeeze (Monday Jan. 05, 2009)
  Established companies are tightening their purse strings when it comes to acquiring venture-based startups and the door to public offerings is essentially closed as startup deals hit significant lows in 2008, according to VentureSource.
  
  
• Top 20 predictions for semis in 2009 (Wednesday Dec. 31, 2008)
  Happy New Year! 2009 is just beginning to unfold in the electronics industry and there is already uncertainty in the air based on recent industry data. To help sort out the confusion in the market, I have released my own chip forecasts--and other predictions--for 2009.
  
  
• Measuring the stability of EDA vendors (Monday Dec. 29, 2008)
  The amount of revenue generated per employee is a measure of the efficiency of a company and an indicator of its viability in a difficult market.
  
  
• CEO interview: with John Daane of Altera (Monday Dec. 29, 2008)
  Despite economic difficulties across the chip industry, FPGA makers didn't have it so bad in 2008. Altera Corp. announced increases in sales and net income for Q3 2008 over Q3 2007. John Daane, president, CEO and chairman of Altera, asserts that market slowdowns can be growth opportunities.
  
  
• Gartner Says Worldwide Semiconductor Revenue Declined $12 Billion in 2008 (Wednesday Dec. 17, 2008)
  For only the fifth time in the last 25 years, the semiconductor industry will post a decline in revenue, with worldwide semiconductor revenue totaling $261.9 billion in 2008, a 4.4 percent decline from 2007, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc.
  
  
• Semi IP: a bright spot in the economy (Monday Dec. 15, 2008)
  Despite the economic downturn, the semiconductor intellectual property (IP) market is growing while the semiconductor component market faces contraction.
  
  
• EDA tools for FPGAs running out of gas (Monday Dec. 15, 2008)
  The field-programmable gate array (FPGA) market has experienced lackluster and flat growth in recent times. But now, the sector faces a set of new challenges that could threaten the business.
  
  
• Reading Cadence's tea leaves (Monday Dec. 01, 2008)
  Analysis of what might be Cadence next step.
  
  
• Has Imagination added Sony to Apple consumer design win? (Monday Nov. 24, 2008)
  Word on the street is that Imagination Technologies Group plc, licensor of graphics processor cores, has added Sony to its tally of international electronics systems company licensees.