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Commentary / Analysis

• Gartner Says Global Smartphone Sales to Only Grow 7 Per Cent in 2016 (Friday Apr. 01, 2016)
  Gartner, Inc. said global smartphone sales will for the first time exhibit single-digit growth in 2016. Global smartphone sales are estimated to reach 1.5 billion units in 2016, a 7 per cent growth from 2015. The total mobile phone market is forecast to reach 1.9 billion units in 2016.
  
  
• Swiss Open-Source Processor Core Ready For IoT (Friday Apr. 01, 2016)
  Researchers at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) and the University of Bologna have developed PULPino, an open-source processor optimized for low power consumption and application in wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT).
  
  
• CEO Interview: Andes' Cores For IoT Suit Europe (Friday Apr. 01, 2016)
  EE Times Europe interviewed Frankwell Jyh-Ming Lin, CEO of Andes Technology Corp. (Hsinchu, Taiwan), a licensor of a range of 32bit processor cores as intellectual property (IP), and asked how the company is planning to address the European market.
  
  
• VLSI Event Reflects Silicon Shifts (Monday Mar. 28, 2016)
  The semiconductor road map is shifting as advances in semiconductor technology become harder and market drivers become more diverse. That’s the message from this year’s VLSI Symposia, an annual gathering of top chip technologists that released its program this week.
  
  
• Silicon Lacks Clear Metrics (Thursday Mar. 24, 2016)
  Analysts differ on who has the best semiconductor process technology, a diversity of views that is understandable given the complexity of the subject and sometimes confusing messages from chip makers themselves.
  
  
• EDA Consortium Reports EDA Industry Revenue for Q4 2015 (Thursday Mar. 24, 2016)
  The EDA Consortium (EDAC) Market Statistics Service (MSS) today announced that the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry revenue declined 1.9 percent for Q4 2015 to $2064.5 million, compared to $2104 million in Q4 2014. The four-quarters moving average, which compares the most recent four quarters to the prior four quarters, increased by 5 percent.
  
  
• Apple has no plans to buy Imagination (Thursday Mar. 24, 2016)
  Apple has said that although it has held talks with struggling processor intellectual property licensor Imagination Technologies Group plc it does not plan to make an offer for the company "at this time."
  
  
• Imagination Stock Rises on Report of Apple Talks (Wednesday Mar. 23, 2016)
  The share price of troubled processor intellectual property licensor Imagination Technologies Group plc (Kings Langley, England) jumped on Tuesday (March 22) on a report of potential acquisition by Apple.
  
  
• Chip Market May Contract Again (Monday Mar. 21, 2016)
  At least one market watcher thinks the semiconductor industry will decline slightly for the second straight year for the second time in its history.
  
  
• TSMC Details Silicon Road Map (Wednesday Mar. 16, 2016)
  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. is ramping its 16nm process and making progress on plans to roll out 10 and 7nm nodes over the next two years.
  
  
• Quantum Computer May Crack Public-Key Encryption (Tuesday Mar. 15, 2016)
  No shortage of encryption and decryption schemes exists, but for those schemes that merely depend on the difficulty of finding the factors of two large prime numbers multiplied together, their days may be numbered, according to a team of researchers.
  
  
• Silicon Shift Ahead in Comms (Monday Mar. 14, 2016)
  A leader of the movement to software-defined networks gives his view of its outlook and implications for semiconductors as an annual summit opens.
  
  
• Up to Their ARMs in Concrete (Thursday Mar. 10, 2016)
  ARM Holdings plc is NOT about to enter the construction industry directly or start making and supplying sensors, contrary to reports from The Times and Daily Mail. But ARM technology is "set" to be deployed in a concrete sensing application.
  
  
• MRAM Breakthrough Looms (Monday Mar. 07, 2016)
  Everybody in the memory business is trying to build a nonvolatile memory that is as fast as static random access memory (SRAM), as dense as flash and as cheap as read-only-memory (ROM). The problems with this "universal" memory (that could replace all others) has already been solved by magnetic random assess memories—according to those making MRAM.
  
  
• Semiconductor Unit Shipments To Exceed One Trillion Devices in 2018 (Monday Mar. 07, 2016)
  Total yearly semiconductor unit shipments (integrated circuits and opto-sensor-discrete, or O-S-D, devices) are forecast to continue their upward march and are now expected to top one trillion units for the first time in 2018, according to data presented in IC Insights’ recently released 2016 edition of The McClean Report
  
  
• Broadcom Identifies $300M Cuts (Friday Mar. 04, 2016)
  Hock Tan has made a lot of progress re-defining Broadcom Corp. in just a month since he acquired it for $37 billion in the semiconductor industry’s biggest deal to date. But the chief executive of the former Avago is not ready to provide details about what the new company looks like yet.
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Sales Off to Sluggish Start in 2016 (Friday Mar. 04, 2016)
  SIA today announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $26.9 billion for the month of January 2016, 2.7 percent lower than the previous month’s total of $27.6 billion and 5.8 percent down from the January 2015 total of $28.5 billion.
  
  
• Xilinx Invests in Neural Network Startup (Thursday Mar. 03, 2016)
  FPGA vendor Xilinx has invested in TeraDeep Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) a developer of convolutional neural network architectures as part of a Data Center Ecosystem development program.
  
  
• Startup offers RF IP for 5G communications (Wednesday Mar. 02, 2016)
  Multifractal Semiconductors SA (Pretoria, South Africa) is a fabless microelectronics company focused on providing silicon IP RF circuit blocks for the global telecommunications market. The company provides silicon-proven analog IP as well as turnkey semiconductor development services with a primary focus on millimeter-wave and ultra-high bandwidth applications, such as future 5G telecommunication systems.
  
  
• ARM has R&D interest in neural network cores (Wednesday Mar. 02, 2016)
  Intellectual property licensor ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England) has a research interest in machine learning and neural networks but is not yet prepared to say whether it can be turned into commercial business.ARM is the global leader in the licensing and supply of hardware in the form of IP.
  
  
• Cisco Rolls 16nm ASICs (Wednesday Mar. 02, 2016)
  Cisco Systems is shipping its first 16nm ASICs in switches that are part of new data center products announced today (Mar. 1). The ASICs leapfrog features offered by Broadcom whose 28nm chips are used in a wide swath of switches made by Cisco and its competitors.
  
  
• Resource-rich MCU targets wearable IoT (Tuesday Mar. 01, 2016)
  It seems like a contradiction in terms to talk about a resource-rich MCU in conjunction with the small, battery-powered application space that is wearables. But ARM aims to resolve that contradiction with its recent release of the Cortex-A32 processor. The combination of processor architecture and process technology in the new device does just that, boasting a 25% more efficient 32-bit core in as little as 0.25 mm2 of silicon.
  
  
• Taiwan Passes South Korea to Become #1 in Total IC Wafer Fab Capacity (Tuesday Mar. 01, 2016)
  IC Insights recently released its new Global Wafer Capacity 2016-2020 report that provides in-depth detail, analyses, and forecasts for IC industry capacity by wafer size, by process geometry, by region, and by product type through 2020.
  
  
• For the 4th quarter of 2015, GPU shipments increased 2.4% from last quarter (Monday Feb. 29, 2016)
  The GPU market and the PC market in general, seems to have found its new normal. The Gaming PC segment, where higher-end GPUs are used, was once again the bright spot in the overall PC market for the quarter.
  
  
• Semiconductor Capital Spending Rebound Fails to Materialize in 2015 (Wednesday Feb. 24, 2016)
  According to IC Insights’ new 2016 edition of The McClean Report, total worldwide semiconductor industry capital spending is forecast to show low single-digit growth in 2016 after registering a 1% decline in 2015. As discussed below, last year’s drop in semiconductor industry capital spending was a significant departure from historical patterns that go back more than 30 years.
  
  
• Qualcomm, CEVA, ARM Race to Next-Gen Modem (Thursday Feb. 18, 2016)
  Advancements of LTE technology, including LTE Advanced and LTE Advanced Pro, are creating havoc. They are spawning a host of new demands that make the next-gen baseband designs far more complex than any of the previous smartphone modems.
  
  
• Red Hat Drives FPGAs, ARM Servers (Monday Feb. 15, 2016)
  FPGA vendors and users will meet next month in an effort to define a standard software interface for accelerators. The meeting is being convened by Red Hat’s chief ARM architect, who gave an update (Wednesday) on efforts to establish ARM servers.
  
  
• Soft Machines: Promising, Not Proven (Monday Feb. 15, 2016)
  Veteran microprocessor analyst Kevin Krewell plumbs startup Soft Machines' VISC technology following a recent release of updated simulation data of its promising multicore architecture.
  
  
• Why AMD Should ARM China (Wednesday Feb. 10, 2016)
  Qualcomm recently joined the party in China where Intel and IBM are longstanding guests. AMD needs to respond to its RSVP.
  
  
• Data Centers Tap ARM, 100GE (Tuesday Feb. 09, 2016)
  It’s still early days in the growth of cloud service providers who are driving trends in servers and Ethernet networks. Their rise is opening small, but significant opportunities for non-x86-based servers, according to analysts at The Linley Group.