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Commentary / Analysis

• Arm's John Ronco on IP for embedded (Monday Mar. 05, 2018)
  ARM has recently gone through a re-organization that has seen John Ronco promoted to the position of vice president and general manager of the Embedded and Auto at the IP licensor. eeNews Europe caught up with Ronco at Embedded World and asked him and about some trends in the IP licensing sector.
  
  
• Qualcomm Taps Samsung's 7nm EUV for 5G (Monday Feb. 26, 2018)
  Qualcomm said it will continue to work with longtime foundry supplier Samsung Electronics on Snapdragon 5G chipsets using Samsung's 7nm Low Power Plus (LPP) process technology with extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography.
  
  
• CEO interview: Flex Logix' Geoff Tate on licensing FPGA (Monday Feb. 26, 2018)
  Flex Logix, founded in 2014, provides licensable field-programmable gate array (FPGA) fabric and has produced fabric cores for multiple manufacturing processes including TSMC's 40, 28 and 16nm processes.
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts January 2018 Billings (Monday Feb. 26, 2018)
  North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $2.36 billion in billings worldwide in January 2018 (three-month average basis), according to the January Equipment Market Data Subscription (EMDS) Billings Report published today by SEMI.
  
  
• Gartner Says Worldwide Sales of Smartphones Recorded First Ever Decline During the Fourth Quarter of 2017 (Thursday Feb. 22, 2018)
  Global sales of smartphones to end users totaled nearly 408 million units in the fourth quarter of 2017, a 5.6 percent decline over the fourth quarter of 2016, according to Gartner, Inc. This is the first year-on-year decline since Gartner started tracking the global smartphone market in 2004.
  
  
• Integrated Circuit Technology Advances Continue to Amaze (Thursday Feb. 22, 2018)
  The success and proliferation of integrated circuits has largely hinged on the ability of IC manufacturers to continue offering more performance and functionality for the money.
  
  
• Top 10 Semiconductor R&D Spenders Increase Outlays 6% in 2017 (Monday Feb. 19, 2018)
  Intel far surpasses others with R&D spending of $13.1 billion in 2017 and accounts for 36% of expenditures among Top R&D spenders.
  
  
• Machine learning interview with Jem Davies of Arm (Thursday Feb. 15, 2018)
  Processor IP licensor ARM has announced a dedicated machine learning processor core and eeNews Europe spoke with Jem Davies, general manager of the machine learning group at ARM, and Dennis Laudick, vice president of marketing for machine learning (ML), to find out more.
  
  
• Qualcomm Preps Silicon as a Service (Wednesday Feb. 14, 2018)
  Qualcomm is leaping from OEM silicon to end-user services with a kind of offering that one analyst sees as the start of a broad trend at the intersection of blockchain technology and the Internet of Things. Qualcomm Wireless Edge Services combines security and management features that are already attracting interest from the likes of Alibaba and Baidu.
  
  
• New IC Manufacturing Lines to Boost Total Industry Wafer Capacity 8% (Monday Feb. 12, 2018)
  IC industry wafer capacity, specifically in the memory segment, was inadequate to meet demand throughout 2017.
  
  
• Arm acquires ChaoLogix for security reasons (Wednesday Feb. 07, 2018)
  Processor IP licensor Arm Ltd. (Cambridge, England) has acquired ChaoLogix Inc. (Gainsville, Florida) for an undisclosed sum of money and folded the company into its security operations.
  
  
• Malta Tour Shows GF Rising (Wednesday Feb. 07, 2018)
  From discussions with leaders and a walk through its highly automated New York fab last week, it looks like GlobalFoundries is on track to continue taking customers away from TSMC.
  
  
• RISC-V processor Mr Wolf arrives to solve problems (Tuesday Feb. 06, 2018)
  Researchers at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) and University of Bologna have received first silicon on their latest PULP-based IoT processor, codenamed Mr. Wolf after the character from the film Pulp Fiction who "solves problems."
  
  
• Annual Silicon Volume Shipments Remain at Record Highs (Tuesday Feb. 06, 2018)
  Worldwide silicon wafer area shipments in 2017 increased by 10 percent against 2016 shipments, while worldwide silicon revenues rose by 21 percent over 2016 levels, reported the SEMI Silicon Manufacturers Group (SMG) in its year-end analysis of the silicon wafer industry.
  
  
• Taiwanese IP Firm Bets on Crypto Technology (Tuesday Feb. 06, 2018)
  eMemory Technology, the world’s seventh-largest IP vendor, expects its physically unclonable function (PUF) technology to continue the company’s strong growth as security issues in the semiconductor industry become a higher priority.
  
  
• Annual Semiconductor Sales Increase 21.6 Percent, Top $400 Billion for First Time (Monday Feb. 05, 2018)
  The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) today announced the global semiconductor industry posted sales totaling $412.2 billion in 2017, the industry’s highest-ever annual sales and an increase of 21.6 percent compared to the 2016 total.
  
  
• Can Ex-Intel President Succeed with Old ARM SoC? (Monday Feb. 05, 2018)
  Startup Ampere Computing, a startup led by former Intel President Renée James, unveiled its ARM-based server SoC, promising to “accelerate hyperscale cloud computing innovations.”
  
  
• Mobile System on Chip Designs, Embedded Processing Lift MPU Market (Friday Feb. 02, 2018)
  Though accounting for less than half of total MPU sales, data-handling cellphones, tablets, and MPUs for embedded processing applications to keep MPU market active through 2022.
  
  
• Chip Heads Gauge Silicon Roadmap (Friday Feb. 02, 2018)
  Whether Moore’s law is dead or alive, the semiconductor roadmap leads to both big challenges and opportunities, according to a panel of technologists from AMD, ARM, and Intel at the DesignCon event here.
  
  
• AI Expands Role in Design (Thursday Feb. 01, 2018)
  Vendors and researchers are making significant progress applying machine learning to the thorny issues of chip design, according to a panel at DesignCon here. The use of AI in EDA was a hot topic that drew a standing-room-only crowd to the panel and spawned several papers at the event.
  
  
• China Foundry Seeks Shared Model (Monday Jan. 29, 2018)
  A plan for a billion-dollar fab in Guangzhou, China, aims to pool investments from fabless companies, creating a built-in customer base. It is the latest addition to a growing list of projects as the country tries to build up its semiconductor sector.
  
  
• Microsemi Reportedly Mulls Sale (Monday Jan. 29, 2018)
  Chipmaker Microsemi has been approached with a takeover offer and is exploring its options, including possible sale, according to a report by the Reuters news service.
  
  
• Gartner Says Samsung and Apple Extended Their Lead as Top Global Semiconductor Customers in 2017 (Thursday Jan. 25, 2018)
  Samsung Electronics and Apple remained the top two semiconductor chip buyers in 2017, representing 19.5 percent of the total worldwide market, according to Gartner, Inc. Samsung and Apple together consumed $81.8 billion of semiconductors in 2017, an increase of more than $20 billion from 2016.
  
  
• UMC Slashes Capex (Thursday Jan. 25, 2018)
  United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) said it will pare its capital expenditures for this year to $1.1 billion as the company expects no significant increase in sales this year.
  
  
• Semiconductor Shipments Forecast to Exceed 1 Trillion Devices in 2018 (Thursday Jan. 25, 2018)
  For 2018, semiconductor unit shipments are forecast to climb to 1,075.1 billion, which equates to 9% growth for the year. Starting in 1978 with 32.6 billion units and going through 2018, the compound annual growth rate for semiconductor units is forecast to be 9.1%, a solid growth figure over the 40 year span.
  
  
• Startup Claims AI Design Wins (Thursday Jan. 25, 2018)
  Startup Gyrfalcon is moving fast with a chip for inferencing on deep neural networks, but it faces an increasingly crowded market in AI silicon.
  
  
• UMC Expects AI to Grow to $3 Billion Business (Wednesday Jan. 24, 2018)
  United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) expects artificial intelligence (AI) to contribute $3 billion to company revenue by 2021 as demand for edge computing and automotive devices takes off.
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts December 2017 Billings (Wednesday Jan. 24, 2018)
  The billings figure is 16.3 percent higher than the final November 2017 level of $2.05 billion, and is 27.7 percent higher than the December 2016 billings level of $1.87 billion.
  
  
• AI Silicon Preps for 2018 Debuts (Tuesday Jan. 23, 2018)
  Deep neural networks are like a tsunami on the distant horizon. Given their still-evolving algorithms and applications, it’s unclear what changes deep neural nets (DNNs) ultimately will bring.
  
  
• TSMC Sees HPC Driving Business (Monday Jan. 22, 2018)
  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) says that high-performance computing (HPC), including demand for chips used in cryptocurrency mining, has replaced smartphones as the key driver of its business.