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Commentary / Analysis

• PA Semi, Apple "Interconnect" at Startup (Wednesday Nov. 15, 2017)
  With a body of engineering experience at LSI, Cisco, SiByte, Broadcom, PA Semi and Apple, Shailendra Desai is confident of his knowledge in SoC designs and what needs to be done.
  
  
• Broad/Qual/NXP Battle Begins (Tuesday Nov. 14, 2017)
  A week after Broadcom made a bold $103 billion bid for Qualcomm, the mobile chip giant rejected it, and Broadcom quickly announced it is standing pat. Now the battle begins in earnest.
  
  
• iPhone X Costs Apple Nearly $370 in Materials, IHS Markit Teardown Reveals (Thursday Nov. 09, 2017)
  Teardown engineers at IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO) have completed their preliminary physical dissection of the new Apple iPhone X and found that the US version of the smartphone with 64 gigabytes (GB) of NAND memory carries a bill of materials (BOM) of $370.25. The iPhone X was purchased from Verizon, where the phone retails for $999.
  
  
• Third Quarter 2017 Silicon Wafer Shipments Increase Quarter-Over-Quarter; another Quarterly Record (Wednesday Nov. 08, 2017)
  
  
  
• Crypto Bugs in IEEE Standard Expose Intellectual Property in Plaintext (Monday Nov. 06, 2017)
  Due to the use of weak cryptography in the IEEE P1735 electronics standard, attackers can recover highly-valuable intellectual property in plaintext.
  
  
• Broadcom, Qualcomm Groked (Monday Nov. 06, 2017)
  What would Hock Tan do with Qualcomm - and maybe even NXP - if the acquisition-prone CEO could gobble them both. Here are some thoughts.
  
  
• Architectures Battle for Deep Learning (Thursday Nov. 02, 2017)
  Chip vendors implement new applications in CPUs. If the application is suitable for GPUs and DSPs, it may move to them next. Over time, companies develop ASICs and ASSPs. Is Deep learning is moving through the same sequence?
  
  
• China FPGA strategy takes shape (Thursday Nov. 02, 2017)
  With President Trump denying China access to Lattice’s technology, the nascent China FPGA industry is looking to develop home-grown programmable logic.
  
  
• Thoughts on Jem Davies leading Arm's machine learning group (Monday Oct. 30, 2017)
  Jem Davies, the engineer who lead ARM's move into graphics processing units (GPUs), has been appointed to the position of general manager of the machine learning group at ARM. That sends a message that ARM is – at last – taking machine learning seriously.
  
  
• 19 Views of Arm Tech Con 2017 (Monday Oct. 30, 2017)
  ARM put software and security, out front at its annual conference here, but the event also was packed with hardware nuggets that ranged from talks by top foundries to demos of diverse customer SoCs.
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Industry Posts Highest-Ever Quarterly Sales (Monday Oct. 30, 2017)
  SIA today announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $107.9 billion for the third quarter of 2017, marking the industry’s highest-ever quarterly sales and an increase of 10.2 percent compared to the previous quarter.
  
  
• Arm Unveils New AI Group (Thursday Oct. 26, 2017)
  A new machine learning group at ARM will create accelerator cores, blocks for its CPU and GPU cores and software to tie it all together. Exactly what the group will deliver and when remains under covers.
  
  
• Arm CEO Sounds Security Alarm (Thursday Oct. 26, 2017)
  ARM Technology CEO Simon Segars called on the technology industry to come together to address security in a connected world, an issue he said threatens to undermine the impact of the Internet of Things and its potential for enhancing human capabilities.
  
  
• Apple Talks About Sole Sourcing from TSMC (Wednesday Oct. 25, 2017)
  At its 30th anniversary celebration this week, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) hosted a forum of key customers including semiconductor CEOs and Apple chief operating officer Jeff Williams.
  
  
• TSMC Expects 10nm Demand to Soar (Monday Oct. 23, 2017)
  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) expects demand for its 10nm products to soar this year while its largest customer, Apple, ramps up production of the iPhone X.
  
  
• IC Insights Raises 2017 IC Market Forecast to +22% (Thursday Oct. 19, 2017)
  IC Insights has raised its IC market growth rate forecast for 2017 to 22%, up six percentage points from the 16% increase shown in its Mid-Year Update.
  
  
• CEO interview: S3 Semi ready for custom opportunity (Tuesday Oct. 17, 2017)
  John O'Brien, CEO of S3 Group Ltd. (Dublin, Ireland) has been making steady progress in shifting his company's business model from one of service to one that is a mix of products and services and that is particularly true in the semiconductor business division.
  
  
• Intel to Battle in FPGA-as-a-Service Race (Tuesday Oct. 17, 2017)
  The cloud service is changing practically everyone’s business. Often, it forces hardware vendors’ hands, and nudges them to offer their products — at drastically reduced rates — “as a service,” rather than selling customers the hardware as a tangible product.
  
  
• Wafer Shipments Forecast to Increase in 2017, 2018 and 2019 (Tuesday Oct. 17, 2017)
  SEMI recently completed its annual silicon shipment forecast for the semiconductor industry. This SEMI forecast provides an outlook for the demand in silicon units for the period 2017–2019.
  
  
• Gartner Says Worldwide Device Shipments Will Increase 2.0 Percent in 2018, Reaching Highest Year-Over-Year Growth Since 2015 (Tuesday Oct. 17, 2017)
  Worldwide shipments of PCs, tablets and smartphones are predicted to exceed 2.35 billion units in 2018, an increase of 2.0 percent from 2017, according to Gartner, Inc. This would be the highest year-over-year growth since 2015.
  
  
• IC Makers Maximize 300mm, 200mm Wafer Capacity (Friday Oct. 13, 2017)
  With the prospects of large 450mm wafers going nowhere, IC manufacturers are increasing efforts to maximize fabrication plants using 300mm and 200mm diameter silicon substrates. The number of 300mm wafer production-class fabs in operation worldwide is expected to increase each year between now and 2021 to reach 123 compared to 98 in 2016.
  
  
• Gartner Says Worldwide Semiconductor Revenue to Reach $411 Billion in 2017 (Thursday Oct. 12, 2017)
  Worldwide semiconductor revenue is forecast to total $411.1 billion in 2017, an increase of 19.7 percent from 2016, according to Gartner, Inc. This represents the strongest growth since the 2010 recovery from the financial crisis when revenue increased by 31.8 percent.
  
  
• Report: TSMC's 3nm Fab Could Cost $20 Billion (Tuesday Oct. 10, 2017)
  A 3mn fab being planned by chip foundry giant TSMC is likely to cost more than $20 billion to build and equip, TMSC Chairman Morris Chang told the Bloomberg news service.
  
  
• Pure-Play Foundries Boosting Their Presence in China (Thursday Oct. 05, 2017)
  In total, pure-play foundry sales in China are expected to jump by 16% this year to about $7.0 billion, more than double the rate of increase for the total pure-play foundry market.
  
  
• Monthly Semiconductor Sales Reach $35 Billion Globally for First Time in August (Tuesday Oct. 03, 2017)
  SIA today announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $35.0 billion for the month of August 2017, an increase of 23.9 percent compared to the August 2016 total of $28.2 billion and 4.0 percent more than the July 2017 total of $33.6 billion.
  
  
• Q&A: Ray Bingham on Canyon Bridge, Imagination (Monday Oct. 02, 2017)
  If Canyon Bridge Capital Partners (Palo Alto, Calif.) succeeds in purchasing Imagination Technologies without a hitch, it will be the very first time the Chinese government-backed buyout fund has closed any deal since the firm was founded in 2016.
  
  
• Partnership Puts ReRAM in SSDs (Wednesday Sep. 27, 2017)
  Solid state drives (SSDs) are pretty much synonymous with NAND flash, but there have been attempts to use a different persistent memory with varying degrees of success.
  
  
• MIPS: Underdog or Dead Horse? (Wednesday Sep. 27, 2017)
  MIPS still has a revenue stream. It's got multi-threading ARM doesn't have. To think of the semiconductor industry losing the only legitimate alternative CPU IP to ARM would be "a real shame," some say.
  
  
• 7 Views of Globalfoundries in 2017 (Monday Sep. 25, 2017)
  Globalfoundries released a flurry of announcements at an annual gathering here, including an upgraded RF process and a 12-nm FinFET node. Analysts applauded the company’s growing capabilities but said that it mainly needs to deliver in the next 12 months a competitive 7-nm process and show a volume market for fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI).
  
  
• ESD Alliance Reports EDA Industry Revenue Increase For Q2 2017 (Monday Sep. 25, 2017)
  The Electronic System Design (ESD) Alliance Market Statistics Service (MSS) today announced that the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry revenue increased 9.8 percent for Q2 2017 to $2209.2 million, compared to $2012.6 million in Q2 2016.