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Commentary / Analysis

• Chip IP Biz & IC Industry M&As (Monday Sep. 26, 2016)
  What do all the latest M&A events in the chip industry mean to semiconductor IP companies?
  
  
• TSMC Expands its 3D Menu (Friday Sep. 23, 2016)
  Taiwan’s largest semiconductor kitchen released its latest menu, a 3D matrix that spans process, packaging and applications-specific options.
  
  
• 2016 a Sequel to Last Year's M&A Mania (Thursday Sep. 22, 2016)
  After an historic surge in semiconductor merger and acquisition agreements in 2015, the torrid pace of transactions has eased (until recently), but 2016 is already the second-largest year ever for chip industry M&A announcements, thanks to three major deals struck in 3Q16 that have a combined total value of $51.0 billion.
  
  
• iPhone 7 Materials Costs Higher than Previous Versions, IHS Markit Teardown Reveals (Wednesday Sep. 21, 2016)
  The bill of materials (BOM) for an iPhone 7 equipped with 32 gigabytes (GB) of NAND flash memory carries $219.80 in bill of materials costs, according to a preliminary estimate from IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO), a world leader in critical information, analytics and solutions
  
  
• Emerging Memories: Ship First, Perfect Later (Tuesday Sep. 20, 2016)
  Perennially emerging memories may be getting stuck in that mode in part because vendors are awaiting an elusive goal: perfection. But Everspin CEO Phillip LoPresti believes instead that it's important to get technology into production to gain market adoption.
  
  
• iPhone 7 Sports Intel, TSMC (Monday Sep. 19, 2016)
  A teardown posted today confirmed Apple put Intel inside at least some of its iPhone 7 handsets, using the x86 giant’s baseband processors acquired from Infineon. The report said Apple used TSMC to make at least some of its A10 Fusion SoCs, probably using its InFO packaging process as well.
  
  
• Most embedded to become IoT (Friday Sep. 16, 2016)
  Last week the sale of ARM to Japan's SouthBank Group became final, and ARM has disappeared from the stock market to become just another division of the telecom giant. SouthBank's intent is to position itself to address the paradigm shift in communications and computing known as the Internet of Things. This positioning may have great significance for embedded developers.
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts August 2016 Book-to-Bill Ratio of 1.03 (Friday Sep. 16, 2016)
  North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.75 billion in orders worldwide in August 2016 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.03, according to the August Equipment Market Data Subscription (EMDS) Book-to-Bill Report published today by SEMI. A book-to-bill of 1.03 means that $103 worth of orders were received for every $100 of product billed for the month.
  
  
• Asia-Pacific To Top 2016 Regional IC Sales In Major System Categories (Thursday Sep. 15, 2016)
  Asia-Pacific’s grip as the dominant market for IC sales is forecast to strengthen in 2016 with the region expected to account for 61.0% of the $282.0 billion IC market this year, based on analysis published in IC Insights’ mid-year Update to the 2016 IC Market Drivers report.
  
  
• Chip Process War Heats Up (Tuesday Sep. 13, 2016)
  Although volumes are still small, fully depleted silicon-on-insulator could grow rapidly in the wake of Globalfoundries’ plans for a 12nm process. Whether Samsung or a new fab coming up in Shanghai will adopt FD-SOI will be a big factor, said veteran market watcher Handel Jones of International Business Strategies.
  
  
• Data Centers Dominate FPGA Event (Monday Sep. 12, 2016)
  In a sign of the times, four out of the five keynote presentations at FPL 2016, a major FPGA conference in Europe, were given by large companies such as IBM, Intel and Microsoft focused on the efficient deployment and use of FPGAs in data centers.
  
  
• Updated Semiconductor Outlook for Internet of Things (Wednesday Sep. 07, 2016)
  Global growth in the number of “things” connected to the Internet continues to significantly outpace the addition of human users to the World Wide Web. New connections to the “Internet of Things” are now increasing by more than 6x the number of people being added to the “Internet of Humans” each year.
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Sales Rebound in July (Wednesday Sep. 07, 2016)
  
  
  
• IC Industry M&A: Who's Left to Buy? (Wednesday Aug. 31, 2016)
  Only eight months in, 2016 is already looking like another blockbuster year for M&A in the global semiconductor industry. The difference is that, while the number of deals is down, the size of some deals is huge, like Softbank's plans to buy ARM for $32 billion in cash.
  
  
• ARM Investors Nod to Its Sale to SoftBank (Wednesday Aug. 31, 2016)
  Shareholders of ARM overwhelmingly approved its sale to SoftBank in Japan on Tuesday (Aug. 30) in a meeting in London.
  
  
• Intel Debuts 14nm+ Processors (Tuesday Aug. 30, 2016)
  Intel Corp. officially announced Kaby Lake, its seventh-generation Core PC processors made in a 14nm+ process and focused on delivering better 4K video.
  
  
• MCU Market Forecast to Reach Record High Revenues Through 2020 (Tuesday Aug. 30, 2016)
  The IC industry’s original system-on-chip (SoC) product category—microcontrollers—is expected to steadily reach record-high annual revenues through the second half of this decade despite an overall slowdown in unit growth during the next five years.
  
  
• AMD increased market share in Q2 2016 despite overall GPU shipments declining 4%, from last quarter (Wednesday Aug. 24, 2016)
  Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry's research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, announced estimated GPU (Graphics Processing Units) shipments and suppliers' market share for Q2'16.
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts July 2016 Book-to-Bill Ratio of 1.05 (Wednesday Aug. 24, 2016)
  North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.79 billion in orders worldwide in July 2016 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.05, according to the July Equipment Market Data Subscription (EMDS) Book-to-Bill Report published today by SEMI. A book-to-bill of 1.05 means that $105 worth of orders were received for every $100 of product billed for the month.
  
  
• TowerJazz and SMIC's Sales Forecast to Surge in 2016 (Wednesday Aug. 24, 2016)
  For 2016, the pure-play foundry market is expected to increase by 9% and greatly outperform the growth rate of total IC market, which is forecast to drop by 2% this year.
  
  
• Microsoft Gives Peek at HoloLens Chip (Tuesday Aug. 23, 2016)
  Microsoft gave the first peek inside the custom vision processor it designed for its HoloLens augmented reality headset. The chip handles a trillion pixel-operations/second in a power budget lower than the 4W Intel Atom-based Cherry Trail SoC that acts as its host processor.
  
  
• ARM Reaches for Supercomputers (Tuesday Aug. 23, 2016)
  ARM has developed vector instructions to propel its 64-bit V8 architecture into high-performance computing. Fujitsu helped develop the extensions for use in a follow on to its K Computer, a Sparc-based system at Japan’s Riken Institute that hit 8 petaflops in 2011 making it the most powerful system in the world at that time.
  
  
• Intel to Accelerate Altera, Says CEO (Friday Aug. 19, 2016)
  Intel’s chief executive pledged to support of the former Altera’s base business including use of ARM cores and long product lead times at the first event of the merged x86 and FPGA makers. In a Q&A session he also provided some insights on the company’s acceleration strategy in light of its recent acquisition of startup Nervana.
  
  
• Intel Foundry embraces ARM; the start of the end? (Thursday Aug. 18, 2016)
  Intel Custom Foundry has made a statement of intent that it is serious about competing with the likes of TSMC, Samsung and Globalfoundries by agreeing a full support package for ARM intellectual property on the upcoming 10nm FinFET manufacturing process.
  
  
• Intel Grabs ARM for 10nm Foundry (Wednesday Aug. 17, 2016)
  Intel revealed its 10nm process could outperform other foundries and will be used to make ARM-based mobile chips for companies including LG Electronics. To enable the move, Intel partnered with ARM’s Artisan division that is porting a reference design for one of its 64-bit cores to the process.
  
  
• Seven Top-20 Semiconductor Suppliers Show Double-Digit Gains in 2Q16 (Tuesday Aug. 16, 2016)
  Thirteen of the top-20 companies had sales of at least $3.0 billion in 1H16. It took $1.86 billion in sales just to make it into the 1H16 top-20 semiconductor supplier list.
  
  
• Huge 2H16 Spending Surge Expected From Samsung, TSMC, and Intel (Thursday Aug. 04, 2016)
  In total, IC Insights forecasts that semiconductor industry capital spending will increase by only 3% this year after declining by 2% in 2015. However, driven by the top three spenders—Samsung, TSMC, and Intel—capital spending in 2016 is expected to be heavily skewed toward the second half of this year.
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Sales Increase in Second Quarter (Tuesday Aug. 02, 2016)
  The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), representing U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing, design, and research, today announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $79.1 billion during the second quarter of 2016, an increase of 1.0 percent over the previous quarter and a decrease of 5.8 percent compared to the second quarter of 2015.
  
  
• Socionext Bleeds Top Network SoC Talent to Acacia (Monday Aug. 01, 2016)
  Socionext, a fabless Japanese chip vendor born from the merger of troubled LSI design teams from Fujitsu and Panasonic, is hemorrhaging top engineering talent at its Network SoC business unit.
  
  
• Will Semi Industry Consolidation Hurt Innovation, R&D Spending? (Friday Jul. 29, 2016)
  Has the semiconductor industry finally reached the level of maturity that requires reduction in R&D spending to continue growing earnings as revenue growth slows? Maybe it does.