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Commentary / Analysis

• ST's New CEO Not Ruling Out Acquisitions in Quest for Growth (Wednesday May. 23, 2018)
  As STMicroelectronics moves closer to its leadership transition, we heard from both outgoing and incoming CEOs this week at the company’s annual capital markets day in London for investors and analysts.
  
  
• Can Mobileye Validate 'True Redundancy'? (Tuesday May. 22, 2018)
  
  
  
• Arm Gives Glimpse of AI Core (Tuesday May. 22, 2018)
  Arm sketched the inner workings of its machine-learning core at a press and analyst event here. Engineers are nearly finished with RTL for the design with hopes of snagging a commitment within weeks for use in a premium smartphone in 2019 or later.
  
  
• Semi Capex Forecast to Exceed $100B for the First Time in 2018 (Tuesday May. 22, 2018)
  IC Insights forecast an 8% increase in semiconductor industry capital spending for this year. However, IC Insights has raised its expectations for 2018 capital spending by six percentage points to a 14% increase.
  
  
• Rambus takes aim at ARM in IoT security (Monday May. 21, 2018)
  Rambus has moved from being a patent and technology licensing company to a product and now an IoT services company that wants to take on ARM. Nick Flaherty talks to Jerome Nadel, the chief marketing officer, on where the company is heading, from cold computing to secure tokens.
  
  
• Microsemi Deal May Spur Broader ReRAM Adoption (Monday May. 21, 2018)
  A deal by Microsemi to license non-volatile resistive RAM (ReRAM) technology from Crossbar could be a significant catalyst paving the way for wider adoption of ReRAM, according to memory industry analysts.
  
  
• Startup Maps AI into Flash Array (Thursday May. 17, 2018)
  Wedged between a coffee shop and a hair salon in a gentrifying suburb here, a couple dozen engineers are exploring a new direction in computing. Startup Mythic aims to map neural networks into NOR memory arrays, calculating and storing results in ways that shave power consumption by perhaps two orders of magnitude.
  
  
• Thirteen Top-15 1Q18 Semi Suppliers Register Double-Digit Gains (Wednesday May. 16, 2018)
  The top-15 worldwide semiconductor sales ranking for 1Q18 includes eight suppliers headquartered in the U.S., three in Europe, two in South Korea, and one each in Taiwan and Japan.
  
  
• First Quarter 2018 Silicon Wafer Shipments Increase Quarter-Over-Quarter to Record Level (Monday May. 14, 2018)
  Reaching their highest recorded quarterly level ever, worldwide silicon wafer area shipments jumped to 3,084 million square inches during the first quarter 2018, a 3.6 percent increase over fourth quarter 2017 area shipments of 2,977 million square inches and a 7.9 percent rise over first quarter 2017 shipments.
  
  
• SMIC to start 14nm risk production in H1 2019 (Monday May. 14, 2018)
  SMIC says it will start risk production on 14nm in H1 2019, reports Digitimes.
  
  
• GF Seeks Fab, ASIC Partners (Monday May. 14, 2018)
  The new CEO of GlobalFoundries has a charter to improve financial performance of the privately-held chip maker. Thus, Tom Caulfield is seeking partners for the company that is a distant second in a hotly competitive race to make chips.
  
  
• Qualcomm reported to be dumping Arm-based server chips (Friday May. 11, 2018)
  In a blow to Arm’s multi-decade effort to get its cores into servers, Qualcomm is reported by Bloomberg to be giving up on its Arm-based server chip programme.
  
  
• ARM loses IP market share to fast-growing followers (Wednesday May. 09, 2018)
  ARM, the undisputed leader in intellectual property core licensing, lost market share in 2017, according to market research from IPnest.
  
  
• Texas Instruments Expands Lead Among Top Analog Suppliers in 2017 (Monday May. 07, 2018)
  The top 10 IC suppliers in the $54.5 billion analog market last year accounted for 59% of the category’s worldwide sales in 2017, according to a recent monthly update to IC Insights’ 2018 McClean Report.
  
  
• AI Gets New Benchmark (Thursday May. 03, 2018)
  Google and Baidu collaborated with researchers at Harvard and Stanford to define a suite of benchmarks for machine learning.
  
  
• TSMC's Roadmap Full, But Thin (Wednesday May. 02, 2018)
  Continuing to move fast in multiple directions at once, TSMC announced it is in volume production with a 7nm process and will have a version using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography ramping early next year. In addition, it gave its first timeline for a 5nm node and announced a half dozen new packaging options.
  
  
• Control of Arm's China business transferred to Chinese investors (Wednesday May. 02, 2018)
  Control of Arm’s operations in China has been transferred to a jv controlled by Chinese investors.
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Sales Up 20 Percent Year-to-Year in Q1 (Wednesday May. 02, 2018)
  SIA today announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $111.1 billion during the first quarter of 2018, an increase of 20 percent compared to the first quarter of 2017, but 2.5 percent less than the fourth quarter of 2017.
  
  
• Intel Delays 10nm Volume Production Until 2019 (Friday Apr. 27, 2018)
  Intel announced the appointment of yet another big name chip architect and provided more evidence that its multi-year quest to diversify beyond the PC is finally paying dividends. But the company also pushed volume production of 10nm chips from late this year to next year, saying progress in improving yields is slower than expected.
  
  
• Samsung, GF Ramp FD-SOI (Friday Apr. 27, 2018)
  Globalfoundries announced it has 36 design wins for its 22nm fully depleted silicon-on-insulator process, more than a dozen of which should tape out this year. Rival Samsung said it expects to tape out more than 20 chips in its 28nm FD-SOI process this year.
  
  
• SEMI Reports 2017 Global Semiconductor Materials Sales of $46.9 Billion (Thursday Apr. 26, 2018)
  SEMI today announced that in 2017 the global semiconductor materials market grew 9.6 percent while worldwide semiconductor revenues increased 21.6 percent from the prior year.
  
  
• Partner in Imagination's owner convicted of insider trading (Wednesday Apr. 25, 2018)
  A co-founder and partner in Canyon Bridge, the China-backed private equity firm which took over Imagination, has been convicted of insider trading by a New York federal court.
  
  
• TSMC Continues to Dominate the Worldwide Foundry Market (Wednesday Apr. 25, 2018)
  Research included in the recently released 50-page April Update to the 2018 edition of IC Insights’ McClean Report shows that in 2017, the top eight major foundry leaders (i.e., sales of ≥$1.0 billion) held 88% of the $62.3 billion worldwide foundry market (Figure 1).
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts March 2018 Billings (Wednesday Apr. 25, 2018)
  North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $2.42 billion in billings worldwide in March 2018 (three-month average basis), according to the March Equipment Market Data Subscription (EMDS) Billings Report published today by SEMI.
  
  
• Accelerators Unite ARM, IBM, X86 (Tuesday Apr. 24, 2018)
  Seven chip makers will define a cache-coherent interconnect for server accelerators, providing an alternative to Intel and Nvidia in a red hot sector of cloud computing. The effort is the first hardware collaboration of its type to span ARM, x86 and Power processors.
  
  
• Gartner Says Worldwide Semiconductor Revenue Grew 21.6 Percent in 2017 as Samsung Takes Over No. 1 Position (Monday Apr. 23, 2018)
  Driven by strong growth in the memory market, worldwide semiconductor revenue totaled $420.4 billion in 2017, a 21.6 percent increase from 2016 revenue of $345.9 billion, according to final results by Gartner, Inc.
  
  
• Facebook to design own processors (Monday Apr. 23, 2018)
  Facebook is running an advert for a manager to build an SoC/ASIC development organization within the company, as it appears ready to go down the route taken by other companies such as Apple, Amazon and Google.
  
  
• Alibaba Adds Embedded CPU Core Designer (Monday Apr. 23, 2018)
  China’s internet behemoth, Alibaba Group, announced on Friday the acquisition of C-Sky Microsystems, a designer of China’s home-grown 32-bit embedded CPU processing core.
  
  
• Qualcomm Begins Layoffs (Thursday Apr. 19, 2018)
  Qualcomm has begun laying off an unspecified number of full-time and temporary workers as part of a cost-cutting plan announced in January.
  
  
• No NN-dedicated hardware on Qualcomm IoT processors (Monday Apr. 16, 2018)
  Qualcomm has announced two 10nm processors in support of IoT applications computing at the edge of the network, the quad-CPU QCS603 and the octa-CPUQCS605.