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Commentary / Analysis

• ARM Achieves Another Successful Quarter (Thursday Jul. 28, 2016)
  Processor intellectual property licensor ARM Holdings plc achieved revenues of £267.6 million (about $350 million) for the second quarter of 2016, up 17 percent from revenues in 2Q15.
  
  
• China's Final Chance to Achieve Its IC Industry Ambitions Now Underway (Wednesday Jul. 27, 2016)
  Over the past 20 years, China has become increasingly frustrated over the gap between its IC imports and indigenous IC production. It has oftentimes been quoted over the last couple of years that China’s imports of semiconductors exceeds that of oil.
  
  
• FDSOI to Get Embedded MRAM, Flash Options at 28nm (Tuesday Jul. 26, 2016)
  Samsung Foundry is going to offer both spin torque transfer magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM) and flash as embedded non-volatile memory options on its 28nm FDSOI manufacturing process.
  
  
• SoftBank/ARM Deal: Political Hurdles Ahead? (Monday Jul. 25, 2016)
  The deal could also face hard scrutiny by the European Commission, which is now becoming more critical about consolidation in the technology sector.
  
  
• Brexit, Techxit? (Friday Jul. 22, 2016)
  Wolfson Microelectronics gone to Cirrus; CSR gone to Qualcomm; Imagination stumbles; UK votes to leave the European Union; ARM votes to become a subsidiary of a Japanese telecommunications company with IoT dreams of grandeur. Is there a steady-state theory of tech company creation and destruction or are we living in a big-bang technology world? And was the bang we just heard the door closing as UK exits hardware technology?
  
  
• Gartner Says Worldwide Semiconductor Capital Spending to Decline 0.7 Percent in 2016 (Thursday Jul. 21, 2016)
  Worldwide semiconductor capital spending is projected to decline 0.7 percent in 2016, to $64.3 billion, according to Gartner, Inc.. This is up from the estimated 2 percent decline in Gartner's previous quarterly forecast.
  
  
• SoftBank's Son: Quixotic or Prophetic? (Thursday Jul. 21, 2016)
  Only history will be able to judge, perhaps 10 or 20 years from now, whether SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is the Don Quixote of our time — an impractical dreamer driven by his huge ego — or a prescient investor in the future of a connected world enhanced by artificial intelligence.
  
  
• If not ARM, which architecture next for IoT (Tuesday Jul. 19, 2016)
  So let’s assume billions of chips are going to get sold for ‘IoT’, what ever that might be. And let’s assume they were going to have ARM Cortex-M_ cores in them. Now that ARM is no longer independent, I can see two futures.
  
  
• ARM Acquisition: What's In It for SoftBank? (Tuesday Jul. 19, 2016)
  For proof that SoftBank is no ordinary Japanese conglomerate, look no further than its just-announced acquisition of ARM. Masayoshi Son, the smart, opinionated and hands-on CEO of SoftBank Group has constantly surprised the financial market with audacious bets like this.
  
  
• ARM, Softbank and 1,500 Engineers (Tuesday Jul. 19, 2016)
  What jobs should ARM give the 1,500 engineers it hopes to hire over the next five years with its new investment from sugar Daddy Softbank?
  
  
• ARM-SoftBank: Selling at Top or Buying at Bottom? (Monday Jul. 18, 2016)
  Is ARM cashing in its chips after a successful 25-year run or is it simply looking to SoftBank for financial back up because the best is yet to come in a global IoT revolution?
  
  
• Why SoftBank Is Spending $32 Billion on ARM (Monday Jul. 18, 2016)
  It’s buying an established titan that’s well-placed for the Internet of things. SoftBank’s impending takeover of ARM Holdings means the Japanese firm is buying the most important company in the world of mobile processors.
  
  
• Comment: IoT made ARM takeover inevitable (Monday Jul. 18, 2016)
  The proposed $32bn takeover of ARM by Japanese firm SoftBank has caught the semiconductor market by surprise. Most observers believe that the processor IP which is the main ARM business was so important to so many chip makers that ARM’s independence was too strategically important to the market to be broken.
  
  
• ARM at the Heart of the Industrial Internet of Things (Monday Jul. 18, 2016)
  According to the latest analysis by Semicast Research, the number of devices available to be connected to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is forecast to grow to almost 2.5 billion annually in 2021, from about 1.2 billion in 2015, a growth rate of almost fifteen percent. Similarly, the total available market for electronics equipment suitable to be connected to the IIoT is forecast to grow to over USD 930 billion, from USD 675 billion over the same period, a growth rate of about six percent.
  
  
• NXP warns cryptographic keys can be hacked (Friday Jul. 15, 2016)
  An encrypted key technology used to make hardware like mobile phones secure may not be as hackable as first thought.
  
  
• TSMC to Adopt Extreme Ultraviolet at 5nm (Friday Jul. 15, 2016)
  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world’s largest foundry, said it will fully implement extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography to make 5nm chips by the end of this decade.
  
  
• Chip Equipment Spending SEMI Forecasts: Flat 2016, Rebound in 2017 (Wednesday Jul. 13, 2016)
  SEMI projects that the worldwide semiconductor equipment market will be flat this year and will rebound in 2017 according to the mid-year edition of the SEMI® Capital Equipment Forecast, released today at the SEMICON West exposition.
  
  
• Ex-Broadcom Unit to Shape Cypress IoT Future (Tuesday Jul. 12, 2016)
  Cypress Semiconductor Corp. last week closed the previously announced acquisition for $550 million of Broadcom’s Internet of Things business unit, in a move designed to establish Cypress as a wireless IoT processor powerhouse.
  
  
• IBM, Samsung Put New Spin on MRAM (Monday Jul. 11, 2016)
  On the 20th anniversary of its invention at IBM Research, fabled nonvolatile "universal" magnetic random access memory (MRAM) is getting an upgrade. IBM announced today (July 7) that, in collaboration with foundry-giant Samsung, it is using a spin-transfer torque (STT) design on its MRAM.
  
  
• Startup Looks to Put PAs on CMOS Express (Monday Jul. 11, 2016)
  After emerging from semi-stealth mode to announce the infusion of $35 million in April, ACCO Semiconductor Inc. is looking to take its CMOS-based RF power amplifier business to the next level.
  
  
• IC Insights Lowers Its 2016 Semiconductor Market Forecast to -1% (Friday Jul. 08, 2016)
  The health of the semiconductor industry is increasingly tied to the health of the worldwide economy. Rarely can there be strong semiconductor market growth without at least “good” worldwide economic growth to support it. Consequently, IC Insights expects annual global semiconductor market growth rates to continue to closely track the performance of worldwide GDP growth.
  
  
• Why Networks Need ASICs (Thursday Jul. 07, 2016)
  Tomorrow's networks are driving price and performance requirements that call for custom silicon, according to a senior manager for a company using ASICs.
  
  
• Lossy Imagination Says There's Good Signs in Graphics (Wednesday Jul. 06, 2016)
  Imagination Technologies Group plc (Kings Langley, England) has told analysts that it has made a market share gain for its graphics processor intellectual property in mid-tier mobile phones and continues to be the market leader at the high-end. However, that did not prevent the troubled company from reporting financial losses for its financial year ended April 30, 2016.
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Sales Up Slightly in May (Wednesday Jul. 06, 2016)
  SIA today announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $26.0 billion for the month of May 2016, an increase of 0.4 percent compared to the previous month’s total of $25.9 billion, but a decrease of 7.7 percent compared to the May 2015 total of $28.1 billion.
  
  
• ESD Alliance Reports EDA Industry Revenue Increase For Q1 2016 (Thursday Jun. 30, 2016)
  ESD Alliance (formerly EDAC) Market Statistics Service (MSS) today announced that the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry revenue increased 4.5 percent for Q1 2016 to $1962 million, compared to $1877 million in Q1 2015.
  
  
• PCIe 4.0 Heads to Fab, 5.0 to Lab (Wednesday Jun. 29, 2016)
  A handful of chips using PCI Express 4.0 are heading to the fab even though the 16G transfers/second specification won’t be final until early next year.
  
  
• China Tops U.S. in Supercomputers (Monday Jun. 20, 2016)
  A new supercomputer in China—the first made with processors designed and made in the People’s Republic -- has been ranked the world’s most powerful system by far. The news comes as China tops the U.S. for the first time in both the number and performance of systems on the latest Top500 list.
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts May 2016 Book-to-Bill Ratio of 1.09 (Monday Jun. 20, 2016)
  North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.75 billion in orders worldwide in May 2016 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.09, according to the May Equipment Market Data Subscription (EMDS) Book-to-Bill Report published today by SEMI.
  
  
• IP Business Should Learn from EDA's Playbook (Thursday Jun. 16, 2016)
  Don’t try to tell Charlie Janac that the electronic design automation and semiconductor intellectual property businesses are branches of the same tree. Janac, who is more than 30 years into a career spanning both disciplines, believes that while the histories of EDA and IP are intertwined, they are not the same.
  
  
• IPhone Deal Would Boost Intel (Monday Jun. 13, 2016)
  Intel Corp. could move into third place as a provider of smartphone modems if a growing number of reports are accurate it has won a substantial portion of sockets for LTE baseband chips in Apple’s iPhone 7.