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Commentary / Analysis

• Eleven Companies Forecast to Account for 78% of Semi Capex in 2017 (Friday Mar. 03, 2017)
  Survey results that will be posted in the March Update to the 20th anniversary 2017 edition of IC Insights’ McClean Report show that eleven companies are forecast to have semiconductor capital expenditure budgets greater than $1.0 billion in 2017, and account for 78% of total worldwide semiconductor industry capital spending this year.
  
  
• Intel, Spreadtrum Demo Brainchild (Thursday Mar. 02, 2017)
  Intel Corp. is showing off in its booth at the Mobile World Congress a new mobile SoC chip developed by China’s Spreadtrum Communications.
  
  
• Masayoshi Son, Softbank Founder Betting on ARM, Preaches Security (Wednesday Mar. 01, 2017)
  Last year, Masayoshi Son, the founder of the Japanese conglomerate Softbank, made a huge bet on microchips. He spent $32 billion to acquire ARM Holdings, whose chip designs are used in the vast majority of modern smartphones.
  
  
• Qualcomm, Samsung, Mediatek Offer Hints on iPhone 8 (Monday Feb. 27, 2017)
  Qualcomm, Samsung and MediaTek, three leading smartphones chip vendors, have come to the Mobile World Congress (MWC) here this week to showcase advanced new modems and apps processors designed to power next-generation smartphones.
  
  
• Taiwan Maintains Largest Share of Global IC Wafer Fab Capacity (Thursday Feb. 23, 2017)
  South Korea narrows gap with Taiwan; China shows biggest increase, accounts for nearly 11%.
  
  
• A Roadmap to Emulation of 15 Billion Gate ICs (Monday Feb. 20, 2017)
  Mentor Graphics Corp. is breaking with EDA’s standard procedure, rolling out an emulation platform that the company says supports a roadmap to 2022, when it will be capable of handling chip designs with 15 billion gates.
  
  
• Intel Continues to Drive Semiconductor Industry R&D Spending (Monday Feb. 20, 2017)
  Intel continued to top all other chip companies in R&D expenditures in 2016 with spending that reached $12.7 billion and represented 22.4% of its semiconductor sales last year. Intel accounted for 36% of the top-10 R&D spending and about 23% of the $56.5 billion total worldwide semiconductor R&D expenditures in 2016.
  
  
• Globalfoundries to build FDSOI fab in China (Monday Feb. 20, 2017)
  Globalfoundries Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has said it will invest in increasing its manufacturing capacity both at existing wafer fabs and by building a 300mm wafer fab in China through a joint venture with the Chengdu Municipality.
  
  
• Nvidia, and AMD Increase GPU Attach Rates While Total GPU Shipments Remain Flat Quarter to Quarter (Thursday Feb. 16, 2017)
  Nvidia Increases market share 1.5% for Quarter, 1.1% over prior year. AMD Delivers 1.4% improvement while Intel share decreased 4% over prior period.
  
  
• Ex-Leadcore Team Crafts SoC for Xiaomi (Wednesday Feb. 15, 2017)
  China insiders weren’t surprised when Xiaomi went vertical, designing its own smartphone SoC, as reported last week by the Wall Street Journal. This was a move foreshadowed two years ago with the arrival at Xiaomi of a team of engineers originally from Leadcore Technology.
  
  
• Winners & Losers of GloFo's China Deal (Tuesday Feb. 14, 2017)
  Globalfoundries' $10 billion Chengdu fab announcement is a reminder of China's inexorable arms race for semiconductor production capacity. Who just gained from the deal? Who's losing ground as the fab tsunami sweeps over China?
  
  
• Profile: Restructured Imagination focusses on PowerVR, MIPS and wireless IP (Monday Feb. 13, 2017)
  Imagination Technologies is back on track, and focussing on intellectual property licencing, according to CEO Andrew Heath.
  
  
• IC Market Growth Limited by Narrow Window of Global GDP Expansion (Thursday Feb. 09, 2017)
  IC Insights’ 20th anniversary, 2017 edition of The McClean Report shows that since 2010, worldwide economic growth has been the primary influencer of IC industry growth.
  
  
• Data Center Calls for 800GE Spec (Thursday Feb. 09, 2017)
  Bandwidth-hungry data centers need a fast-track effort this year to define 800 Gbit/second Ethernet links, said a networking veteran. The existing IEEE process is too slow to serve the needs of Web giants, said Andreas Bechtolshiem, chairman of Arista Networks and a serial entrepreneur.
  
  
• Report: Apple to add ARM processor to Mac computers (Wednesday Feb. 08, 2017)
  Apple is designing an ARM-based processor chip to augment the main Intel processor within its Mac laptop computers, according to a Bloomberg report.
  
  
• Micron, Hynix Reportedly Seek Stake in Toshiba (Wednesday Feb. 08, 2017)
  Memory chip heavyweights Micon Technology Inc. and SK Hynix Inc. were among five firms to submit bids to acquire a stake in Toshiba Corp.’s memory chip unit by the end of last week, according to reports.
  
  
• TSMC, Samsung Diverge at 7nm (Wednesday Feb. 08, 2017)
  Samsung and TSMC gave two very different glimpses of their work on 7nm process technology at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) here. Both companies presented work on SRAMs, typically a key driver for next-generation nodes.
  
  
• TSMC Calls for New EDA Paradigm (Tuesday Feb. 07, 2017)
  Engineers need a new class of tools to keep up with the complexity of designing today’s semiconductors, said a keynoter at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC).
  
  
• Intel Shows 2.5D FPGA at ISSCC (Tuesday Feb. 07, 2017)
  Intel gave the most detailed look at its lower cost alternative to 2.5D packaging in a paper on its Stratix X FPGA at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC)
  
  
• AI Attracts Embedded Chip Veteran (Monday Feb. 06, 2017)
  A veteran semiconductor executive launched a company to serve machine-learning startups that target embedded systems. He is already tracking more than 200 companies jumping into the fray that technology web giants such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook see as strategic.
  
  
• AI Tapped to Improve Design (Monday Feb. 06, 2017)
  Nine companies and three universities have launched a research effort to see if machine learning can solve some of the toughest problems in electronics design. The center is one of many efforts across the industry trying to tap into the emerging technology.
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Sales Reach $339 Billion in 2016 (Friday Feb. 03, 2017)
  The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) today announced the global semiconductor industry posted sales totaling $338.9 billion in 2016, the industry’s highest-ever annual sales and a modest increase of 1.1 percent compared to the 2015 total.
  
  
• UMC to Start 14nm Shipments in Q1 (Friday Feb. 03, 2017)
  Taiwanese foundry United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) plans to start shipments of its 14nm FinFET in the first quarter of 2017, according to the company's CEO.
  
  
• Virtual Reality Market To Grow When Hardware & Content Cost Less (Thursday Feb. 02, 2017)
  What will the tipping point be for mass adoption of virtual and augmented reality? This year's Mobile World Congress has some clues.
  
  
• Gartner Says Samsung and Apple Continued to Lead as Top Global Semiconductor Customers in 2016 (Wednesday Feb. 01, 2017)
  Samsung Electronics and Apple remained the top two semiconductor chip buyers in 2016, representing 18.2 percent of the total worldwide market, according to Gartner, Inc.
  
  
• Slow India may lose Cricket wafer fab (Tuesday Jan. 31, 2017)
  Cricket Semiconductor, an analog and power pure-play foundry project that was being prepared for touch down in India, is running late and could end up being constructed in a different country.
  
  
• Persistent Memory Platform Support Will Take Time (Monday Jan. 30, 2017)
  Over the last several years, there's been an increasing overlap between what was traditionally seen as memory and traditionally seen as storage, as well as the increasing use of persistent memory.
  
  
• Toshiba Confirms Memory Chip Selloff (Monday Jan. 30, 2017)
  At a press conference here Friday(Jan. 27), Toshiba Corp. formally announced that it is in the market to sell a chunk — less than 20 percent — of its memory chip business.
  
  
• Memory compressor IP can save time, energy (Thursday Jan. 26, 2017)
  ZeroPoint Technologies AB (Goteborg, Sweden) is developing a hardware-based approach to data compression called MaxiMem that could be useful for both servers and leaf node equipment.
  
  
• Ex-Elpida CEO's China Fab Plan Dropped? (Thursday Jan. 26, 2017)
  In a span of just 11 months, a China-based memory chip company founded by the former CEO of Elpida Memory Inc. morphed from a dream to an apparent reality to a phantom.