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Commentary / Analysis

• Q'comm Exec: "Automotive Changed Our DNA" (Friday Jan. 18, 2019)
  Had Qualcomm’s marriage with NXP been consummated, the Consumer Electronics Show last week would have been the stage to unveil the world’s largest automotive chip giant (Qualcomm/NXP).
  
  
• Value of Semiconductor Mergers and Acquisitions Falls Considerably (Friday Jan. 18, 2019)
  The historic flood of merger and acquisition agreements that swept through the semiconductor industry in 2015 and 2016 slowed significantly in 2017 and then eased back further in 2018, but the total value of M&A deals reached in the last year was still nearly more than twice the annual average during the first half of this decade.
  
  
• Semiconductor Leaders' Marketshares Swell Over the Past 10 Years (Tuesday Jan. 15, 2019)
  The top 5 semiconductor suppliers accounted for 47% of the world’s semiconductor sales in 2018, an increase of 14 percentage points from 10 years earlier.
  
  
• Apple's $1 Billion Baseband Deal (Monday Jan. 14, 2019)
  Qualcomm paid Apple $1 billion in a three-year deal in 2011 to win its cellular modem business.
  
  
• Apple Testifies in Q'comm Patent Case (Monday Jan. 14, 2019)
  Qualcomm and Apple faced off in San Jose District Court Friday in the ongoing dispute over patents. An Apple executive suggested Qualcomm’s royalties were more than $10 per iPhone.
  
  
• Flash Memory Remains Primary Target for Capex Spending (Monday Jan. 14, 2019)
  The semiconductor industry is expected to allocate the largest portion of its capex spending for flash memory again in 2019, marking the third consecutive year that flash has led all other segments in spending.
  
  
• UMC retreats from China DRAM venture, Report says (Monday Jan. 14, 2019)
  United Microelectronics Corp. (Hsinchu, Taiwan), the foundry whose DRAM development support of China's Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co. was a focus of the US-China trade dispute in 2018, is retreating from the collaboration, according to the Nikkei Asian Review.
  
  
• A New DSP Approach to Accelerate 5G and AI Design Development (Monday Jan. 14, 2019)
  A more efficient flow to support DSP development groups, such as VSORA’s, could help to ensure the success of 5G
  
  
• IFI CLAIMS Announces 2018's Top U.S. Patent Recipients (Thursday Jan. 10, 2019)
  IFI CLAIMS Patent Services, provider of a leading global patent data platform, today released its annual analysis of U.S. patent activity for 2018
  
  
• Semis Hope for Soft Landing (Thursday Jan. 10, 2019)
  The semiconductor industry is expected to slow down and maybe even contract slightly this year, but analysts are hopeful of a soft landing once the sector navigates the bumps of a few big uncertainties ahead.
  
  
• China Market Drives Essentially All Pure-Play Foundry Growth in 2018 (Wednesday Jan. 09, 2019)
  With the recent rise of the fabless IC companies in China, the demand for foundry services has also risen in that country. In total, pure-play foundry sales in China jumped by 30% in 2017 to $7.6 billion, triple the 9% increase for the total pure-play foundry market that year. Moreover, in 2018, pure-play foundry sales to China surged by an amazing 41%, over 8x the 5% increase for the total pure-play foundry market last year.
  
  
• China Wafer Production Capacity Growth Fastest in World (Tuesday Jan. 08, 2019)
  China’s installed fab capacity is forecast to grow at a 12 percent CAGR from 2.3 million wafers per month (wpm) in 2015 to 4 million wpm in 2020, faster than all other regions.
  
  
• ESD Alliance Reports EDA Industry Revenue Increase For Q3 2018 (Monday Jan. 07, 2019)
  The Electronic System Design (ESD) Alliance Market Statistics Service (MSS) today announced that the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry revenue increased 6.7 percent for Q3 2018 to $2435.6 million, compared to $2283.2 million in Q3 2017
  
  
• Gartner Says Worldwide Semiconductor Revenue Grew 13.4 Percent in 2018; Increase Driven by Memory Market (Monday Jan. 07, 2019)
  Worldwide semiconductor revenue totaled $476.7 billion in 2018, a 13.4 percent increase from 2017, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc. Memory strengthened its position as the largest semiconductor category, accounting for 34.8 percent of total semiconductor revenue, up from 31 percent in 2017.
  
  
• Wi-Fi Startups Polish HaLow for IoT (Thursday Jan. 03, 2019)
  After an unusual two-year delay, silicon for a new Wi-Fi standard is starting to emerge. Over the next few months, a handful of startups will sample chips for 802.11ah, a 900-MHz version of Wi-Fi targeting long-range links especially for the internet of things.
  
  
• Researchers Explore Emerging Memories for AI (Thursday Jan. 03, 2019)
  Resistive random access memory (ReRAM) and other emerging memory technologies have been getting a lot of attention in the past year as semiconductor companies look for ways to more efficiently deal with the requirements of artificial intelligence and neuromorphic computing.
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Sales Up 9.8 Percent Year-to-Year in November (Wednesday Jan. 02, 2019)
  SIA today announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $41.4 billion for the month of November 2018, an increase of 9.8 percent from the November 2017 total of $37.7 billion and 1.1 percent less than the October 2018 total of $41.8 billion.
  
  
• Foxconn Reportedly Readies Chip Fab in China (Thursday Dec. 27, 2018)
  Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision is set to break ground in 2020 on a $9 billion 300mm chip fab in the city of Zhuhai in southern China, according to a report by the Nikkei news service.
  
  
• MIPS Goes Open Source (Tuesday Dec. 18, 2018)
  Without question, 2018 was the year RISC-V genuinely began to build momentum among chip architects hungry for open-source instruction sets. That was then. By 2019, RISC-V won’t be the only game in town.
  
  
• Total Fab Equipment Spending Reverses Course, Growth Outlook Revised Downward (Tuesday Dec. 18, 2018)
  Total fab equipment spending in 2019 is projected to drop 8 percent, a sharp reversal from the previously forecast increase of 7 percent as fab investment growth has been revised downward for 2018 to 10 percent from the 14 percent predicted in August, according to the latest edition of the World Fab Forecast Report published by SEMI.
  
  
• DRAM Growth Tops Industry Ranking in 2018; Outlook Dims for 2019 (Friday Dec. 14, 2018)
  Topping the chart of fastest-growing products for 2018 is DRAM, which comes as no surprise given the strong rise of average selling prices in this segment over the past two years.
  
  
• Semiconductor Equipment Sales Forecast: $62 Billion in 2018 A New Record, Market Reset in 2019 with New High in 2020 (Wednesday Dec. 12, 2018)
  SEMI today reported that worldwide sales of new semiconductor manufacturing equipment are projected to increase 9.7 percent to $62.1 billion in 2018, exceeding the historic high of $56.6 billion set last year. The equipment market is expected to contract 4.0 percent in 2019 but grow 20.7 percent to reach $71.9 billion, an all-time high.
  
  
• Arm Releases IoT Predictions for 2019 (Monday Dec. 10, 2018)
  The end of the year brings predictions galore, and Arm has jumped on this bandwagon with its view on what it thinks will happen in the internet of things (IoT) in 2019. It also carried out a consumer survey to find out what end users think about IoT, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and 5G.
  
  
• RISC-V Takes a Leap Forward (Wednesday Dec. 05, 2018)
  RISC-V is open for business, proponents will claim at the first annual summit for the open-source instruction set architecture today. The Silicon Valley event comes at a time when backers say that China is rallying around the architecture with perhaps hundreds of RISC-V SoCs and dozens of cores in the works.
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Sales Increase 12.7 Percent Year-to-Year in October; Double-Digit Annual Growth Projected for 2018 (Tuesday Dec. 04, 2018)
  The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) today announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $41.8 billion for the month of October 2018, an increase of 12.7 percent from the October 2017 total of $37.1 billion and 1.0 percent more than last month’s total of $41.4 billion.
  
  
• Worldwide Semiconductor Equipment Billings Drop to $15.8 Billion in Third Quarter 2018, SEMI Reports (Monday Dec. 03, 2018)
  SEMI today reported that third quarter 2018 worldwide semiconductor manufacturing equipment billings dropped 5 percent from the previous quarter to US$15.8 billion but are 11 percent higher than the same quarter a year ago.
  
  
• NVMe Hits a Tipping Point (Monday Dec. 03, 2018)
  You know you’ve made it when you get your own show. The fact that there’s a show dedicated to NVM Express (NVMe) next month solidifies an industry-wide sentiment that the host controller interface and storage protocol hit a tipping point in the last year.
  
  
• Arm Drops Cordio BLE IP (Friday Nov. 30, 2018)
  Arm is abandoning development of its Cordio hardware IP for low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) applications based on the NarrowBand IoT standard, but will continue to concentrate on the Cordio BLE software stack, EE Times has learned.
  
  
• Samsung's Big Semi Capex Spending Keeps Pressure on Competition (Friday Nov. 30, 2018)
  Samsung is expected to have the largest capex budget of any IC supplier again in 2018. After spending $24.2 billion for semiconductor capex in 2017, IC Insights forecasts that Samsung’s spending will edge slightly downward, but remain at a very strong level of $22.6 billion in 2018
  
  
• Xilinx's New FPGAs Address Evolving Threats, Fake ICs (Wednesday Nov. 28, 2018)
  FPGA pioneer Xilinx is targeting a range or military and space applications with its latest generation of “defense-grade’ programmable logic chips, including expanded military use of machine learning and AI applications as well as securing devices at the network edge.