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Commentary / Analysis

• AI Chip Startup Shares Insights (Wednesday Nov. 02, 2016)
  Graphcore Ltd., a startup based here developing a machine learning processor, is not ready to make details of its hardware architecture public, but CEO Nigel Toon and CTO Simon Knowles did discuss with EE Times Europe some of their thinking on a variety of technology and business issues.
  
  
• MediaTek May Be Among First with 10nm SoCs (Monday Oct. 31, 2016)
  MediaTek, Qualcomm’s largest rival in the smartphone silicon business, said it aims to be among the chip industry’s first companies with 10nm products on the market starting in the second quarter next year.
  
  
• $35B Qualcomm Question: What Next? (Monday Oct. 31, 2016)
  Now that Qualcomm has formally announced its purchase of NXP Semiconductors, it’s time to examine the deal’s potential consequences.
  
  
• ARM Fellow Surveys Moore's Law (Thursday Oct. 27, 2016)
  Chip makers used to laugh at Greg Yeric’s idea for boosting Moore’s law. It was too difficult and risky. Now they’re researching it.
  
  
• Semiconductor IP Market to Exceed $8 Billion by 2020, According to Semico Research (Thursday Oct. 27, 2016)
  A new Semico Research report, Licensing, Royalty and Service Revenues for 3rd Party SIP: A Market Analysis and Forecast for 2016, forecasts the market to exceed $8 billion by 2020. However, the 'law of large numbers' will assert itself, and the torrent of growth over the past 10 years will start to slow.
  
  
• TSMC Likely to Lock up Apple A10, A11 Orders (Wednesday Oct. 26, 2016)
  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) will probably make nearly all of the A10 and A11 processors for Apple this year and next because of a competitive advantage the Taiwan foundry has gained in packaging technology, according to analysts.
  
  
• Intel, ARM Battle over IoT (Tuesday Oct. 25, 2016)
  The battle for the Internet of Things heats up this week as Intel and ARM fire off competing announcements to establish their microprocessor architectures on its broad frontiers.
  
  
• Qualcomm-NXP: Another Testosterone-Driven Deal? (Monday Oct. 24, 2016)
  Hard questions are arising. It comes back to finding the justification for this deal. Does this deal really make sense for Qualcomm?
  
  
• TSMC, GF/Samsung Battle at 7nm (Monday Oct. 24, 2016)
  TSMC will go head-to-head with the partnership of IBM, Globalfoundries and Samsung to publicly detail rival 7nm processes at a technical conference in December. The trio’s process will use extreme ultraviolet lithography to achieve impressive gains, but TSMC likely will get to market first due to challenges getting EUV into production.
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts September 2016 Book-to-Bill Ratio of 1.05 (Friday Oct. 21, 2016)
  North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.60 billion in orders worldwide in September 2016 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.05.
  
  
• 2016 IC Market Forecast Raised from -2% to +1% (Thursday Oct. 20, 2016)
  IC Insights has raised its IC market forecast for 2016 by three percentage points from a 2% decline to a 1% increase and its 2016 IC unit volume shipment growth rate forecast from 4% to 6%. A large portion of this revision is due to a strengthening DRAM market.
  
  
• Oxygen Layer May Extend Moore's Law (Wednesday Oct. 19, 2016)
  Moore's Law could be extended again sans scaling, according to Robert Mears. Mears invented the Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) — the first commercial and still popular method of amplifying optical signals without having to convert them into electrical signals (and back again).
  
  
• Mentor Graphics working with Bank of America to explore sale-sources (Monday Oct. 17, 2016)
  Mentor Graphics Corp, a company that makes software for designing semiconductors, is working with Bank of America Corp to explore strategic alternatives, including a potential sale, according to people familiar with the matter.
  
  
• Q&A: Embedded FPGA Facilitates Reconfigurable SoC/MCU RTL Blocks (Monday Oct. 17, 2016)
  Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have provided developers with flexibility. Recently, FPGAs have incorporated system-on-chip (SoC) microprocessors such 64-bit, ARM Cortex-A57 cores. This simplifies programming and integration, but there are other alternatives as well, such as Flex Logix’s embedded FPGAs that make it possible to integrate an FPGA within an ASIC.
  
  
• TSMC Grows Share of Foundry Business (Thursday Oct. 13, 2016)
  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) increased its share of the foundry business to 55 percent this year on better than expected demand for smartphones during the third quarter.
  
  
• Did Processor Cause Samsung Note 7 Blowup? (Thursday Oct. 13, 2016)
  It’s far from clear what exactly caused Samsung Note 7 to catch fire at this point. Samsung isn’t talking until after it finishes its own investigation.
  
  
• Gartner Says Worldwide Semiconductor Capital Spending to Decline 0.3 Percent in 2016 (Wednesday Oct. 12, 2016)
  Worldwide semiconductor capital spending is projected to decline 0.3 percent in 2016, to $64.6 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. (see Table 1). This is up slightly from the estimated 0.7 percent decline in Gartner's previous quarterly forecast. The market is expected to return to growth in 2017, increasing 7.4 percent.
  
  
• SureCore SRAMs design-ready, says CEO (Tuesday Oct. 11, 2016)
  First tape-outs could come as soon as the first quarter of 2017 for memory intellectual property licensor SureCore Ltd. (Sheffield, England), according to company CEO, Paul Wells.
  
  
• Companies Maximizing 300mm, 200mm Wafer Capacity (Monday Oct. 10, 2016)
  Enormous financial and technology hurdles continue to plague the development of 450mm wafers. Ambitious goals to put 450mm wafers to use have been scaled back. IC manufacturers are instead maximizing their manufacturing efficiency using 300mm and 200mm wafers.
  
  
• Startup Digs Deep Learning, Snags Big Backers (Thursday Oct. 06, 2016)
  At a time when “Deep Learning” isn’t just hot but approaching the hype-cycle’s boiling point, nobody should be surprised at the emergence of another deep-learning, vision processing startup.
  
  
• EE Slashes CPU Design Cost (Thursday Oct. 06, 2016)
  One engineer, with a little help from contractors, taped out in less than a year a 4.5 billion transistor chip that on paper kicks out more GFlops/mm2 than Intel’s top-end processors. Andreas Olofsson says the Adapteva Epiphany-V shows a hundred-fold efficiency gain in the way chips can be designed.
  
  
• Ethernet Flexes Network Muscles (Thursday Oct. 06, 2016)
  A new generation of Ethernet silicon is in the works that could help further spread use — especially in optical backbone networks — of the already widely adopted networking technology. Flexible Ethernet enables chips that can dial in different data rates as needed.
  
  
• TSMC Staffing R&D for 3nm Process (Thursday Oct. 06, 2016)
  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (TSMC) will actively develop 5-nanometer process technology, while dedicating between 300 and 400 R&D personnel in developing a 3-nanometer process, ultimately aiming at the 1-nanometer manufacturing process, reports Taiwanese magazine CTimes.
  
  
• Sony-Inside Huami Watch: Is It Time for FD-SOI? (Thursday Oct. 06, 2016)
  Without any visible end products to justify its proponents’ ultra-low-energy promise, FD-SOI has struggled to overcome the skepticism of many engineers in the semiconductor industry.
  
  
• Google Does Consumer Electronics (Tuesday Oct. 04, 2016)
  October 4 was a big day for Google, the coming out of a new OEM inside the Web search giant. It may also mark a pivot for consumer electronics to an era driven by machine-learning services running in the cloud.
  
  
• Qualcomm, NXP Discuss Merger, Say Reports (Friday Sep. 30, 2016)
  Qualcomm is in talks to buy NXP Semiconductors for more than $30 billion, according to multiple press reports. The reports have driven NXP’s stock up about 15% to an estimated market capitalization of about $33 billion.
  
  
• ESD Alliance Reports EDA Industry Revenue Increase For Q2 2016 (Thursday Sep. 29, 2016)
  ESD Alliance Market Statistics Service (MSS) today announced that the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry revenue increased 5.6 percent for Q2 2016 to $2012.6 million, compared to $1906.5 million in Q2 2015.
  
  
• Leading-Edge Leads the Way in Pure-Play Foundry Growth (Wednesday Sep. 28, 2016)
  TSMC has long been the technology leader among the major pure-play foundries. 1, 54% of TSMC’s 2016 revenue is expected to come from <40nm processing. GlobalFoundries, which has dedicated a large portion of its capacity to making advanced processors over the past few years, also generates a large portion of its sales based on leading-edge process technology and feature sizes. In 2016, 52% of GlobalFoundries’ sales are forecast to come from <40nm production.
  
  
• Chip Market to Go Down, says Future Horizons (Tuesday Sep. 27, 2016)
  Malcolm Penn, the founder and CEO of Future Horizons Ltd. and usually one of the most bullish of chip market forecasters, thinks 2017 could be a third year of decline for the global semiconductor industry.
  
  
• Imagination 2.0 Update Ships (Monday Sep. 26, 2016)
  The MIPS core will be used in a new cellular baseband processor shipping next year and a supercomputer in the works in Japan. The two data points are welcome news at Imagination Technologies as it puts the finishing touches on a reorganization and reflects on directions in licensing.