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Commentary / Analysis

• UMC Joins Elite Club (Thursday Aug. 20, 2015)
  With the arrival of a UMC fabbed MDM9625 sporting high-k metal gates, another foundry joins the elite club who have mastered the gate-last metal gate (HKMG) transistor, the likes of which includes Intel, Samsung and TSMC.
  
  
• MediaTek Faces Eroded Smartphone Growth (Thursday Aug. 20, 2015)
  MediaTek’s rapid growth in 4G smartphones is likely to be undermined by handset makers in China who are designing their own chips, according to an analyst who covers the tech industry in Asia.
  
  
• USB Ain't So Simple Anymore (Wednesday Aug. 19, 2015)
  A number of chip vendors including Cypress Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, NXP Semiconductors and Lattice Semiconductor have had a busy summer rolling out new USB Type-C chips, an accelerated product launch that effectively ends an era of scarcity for USB Type C.
  
  
• Intel Skylake Gets Mixed Reviews (Wednesday Aug. 19, 2015)
  Analysts gave mixed reviews to Skylake, Intel’s next-generation 14nm SoC. They praised several improvements but noted only a few performance metrics have emerged to date for the architecture described at the Intel Developer Forum here.
  
  
• Overall GPU shipments dropped 11% from last quarter, AMD slipped 26%, Nvidia fell 16%, and Intel saw a 7.4% slip (Tuesday Aug. 18, 2015)
  Discrete GPUs continue to slip as embedded GPUs in the CPU and APU bring better performance for free. The erosion of the low end of the market by tablets seems to have subsided, and even tablet sales were off for the second quarter in a row.
  
  
• PMC-Sierra Scales Storage with PCIe, NVMe (Tuesday Aug. 18, 2015)
  As more NVM Express (NVMe)-capable SSDS debut and the protocol gains traction, more controllers are hitting the market to allow storage infrastructures to get the most from these drives. In the meantime, PCI Express (PCIe) is seeing more adoption in storage applications
  
  
• Inside GlobalFoundries' Fab 8 (Tuesday Aug. 18, 2015)
  GlobalFoundries' Fab 8, one of the largest semiconductor fabs in the United States, sits on 233 acres deposited long ago by a glacier now part of the Luther Forest tech campus in Malta, N.Y. A tour of the plant and an affiliated research center in nearby Albany provided a look inside an operation that now carries the DNA of chip giants such as AMD, IBM and Samsung.
  
  
• Should Altera Worry About Intel's M&A Record? (Monday Aug. 17, 2015)
  Altera’s fate after its pending acquisition by Intel is anybody’s guess, but in the meantime, the respected programmable logic device manufacturer’s product, technology roadmap and employees clearly are on tenterhooks.
  
  
• CMOS Image Sensors See Higher Growth from Greater Diversity of Uses (Thursday Aug. 13, 2015)
  After leveling off in the second half of the last decade, CMOS image sensors are in the midst of a strong new wave of growth, which is being driven by a broad range of applications and promises to lift worldwide sales to record-high levels each year through 2019
  
  
• Qualcomm Tips Comeback Chip (Thursday Aug. 13, 2015)
  The specs on Qualcomm's comeback chip look good to a veteran analyst who is particularly impressed by its graphics and imaging improvements.
  
  
• Intel Said to Unseat Qualcomm in iPhone (Thursday Aug. 13, 2015)
  Speculation about a design win for Intel Corp. in a next-generation Apple iPhone is resurfacing with a vengeance.
  
  
• Samsung Cuts Intel's Semiconductor Sales Lead to 16% in 2Q15 (Thursday Aug. 06, 2015)
  It took just over $2.2 billion in sales just to make it into the 1H15 top-20 ranking and eight of the top 20 companies had 1H15 sales of at least $5.0 billion. The
  
  
• New CISC Architecture Takes on RISC (Wednesday Aug. 05, 2015)
  A recent study in the ACM Transactions on Computer Systems came to the conclusion that processor instruction set architectures, whether reduced (RISC) or complex (CISC), are irrelevant to basic power and performance in today's designs, particularly in relation to either the ARM or Intel processors.
  
  
• Mid-Year Global Semiconductor Sales Ahead of Last Year's Pace by 4 Percent (Monday Aug. 03, 2015)
  SIA today announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $84.0 billion during the second quarter of 2015, an increase of 1.0 percent over the previous quarter and 2.0 percent compared to the second quarter of 2014.
  
  
• The Computer Graphics market will exceed $235 billion by 2018 (Monday Aug. 03, 2015)
  
  
  
• Tsunami of M&A Deals Underway in the Semiconductor Industry in 2015 (Wednesday Jul. 29, 2015)
  In just the first half of 2015 alone, announced semiconductor acquisition agreements had a combined total value of $72.6 billion, which is nearly 6x the annual average for M&A deals struck during the five previous years (2010-2014).
  
  
• UMC Cuts Expectations for 28nm Ramp on Weaker Demand (Wednesday Jul. 29, 2015)
  United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC), the world’s second-largest foundry, said its ramp of 28nm process technology will slow as the outlook for demand is likely to remain weak until the first half of 2016 while the chip industry works its way out of an inventory correction.
  
  
• Tablet Processor Sales Fell in 1Q15 (Monday Jul. 27, 2015)
  The market for application processors for tablet computers fell 6 percent in 1Q15 compared with the same quarter a year before, according to Strategy Analytics.
  
  
• Qualcomm Layoffs Spawned by Letter (Monday Jul. 27, 2015)
  A smart and well-heeled investor pulled hard enough on Qualcomm to help bring down some 4,700 employees.
  
  
• Can Globalfoundries and Europe's chip firms unite? (Wednesday Jul. 22, 2015)
  Globalfoundries' Dresden wafer fab could become the European More-than-Moore foundry that the local chip companies lacked the courage to commission. As such Globalfoundries could yet receive financial support from the European Commission to expand its presence in Europe.
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts June 2015 Book-to-Bill Ratio of 0.98 (Wednesday Jul. 22, 2015)
  North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.51 billion in orders worldwide in June 2015 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 0.98, according to the June EMDS Book-to-Bill Report published today by SEMI. A book-to-bill of 0.98 means that $98 worth of orders were received for every $100 of product billed for the month.
  
  
• Taiwan Chipmakers Leery of M&A Wave (Monday Jul. 20, 2015)
  Taiwan chipmakers say they’re worried that the ongoing wave of global merger and acquisition (M&A) activity in the semiconductor industry may leave them stranded.
  
  
• High Customer Interest in FD-SOI, Globalfoundries Says (Friday Jul. 17, 2015)
  Customer interest is unusually high in Globalfoundries’ newly announced 22nm fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) manufacturing platform, which could be in high-volume manufacturing by the middle of 2017, a company executive said at the Semicon West tradeshow here.
  
  
• TSMC Trims 2015 Outlook (Friday Jul. 17, 2015)
  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world’s largest chip foundry, said the outlook for the rest of this year is worse than the company previously expected because customers are digesting an inventory glut that built up earlier this year.
  
  
• Ex-IBMer Fired Up for Foundry (Thursday Jul. 16, 2015)
  Gary Patton is like a man on fire. The former IBM semiconductor research manager is now in the hot seat to create the next two generations of semiconductors at Globalfoundries. As much as any of the several thousand people at Semicon West here he can tell you that’s not going to be easy.
  
  
• PC, Mobile Slump Hits Chips (Thursday Jul. 16, 2015)
  Semiconductor sales are in a two-year slump due to weak demand for PCs and smartphones, according to a new forecast. The Internet of Things and China are generating excitement, but are not expected even in the medium term to provide a significant boost.
  
  
• Wearable Systems Give Major Boost to Total IoT Sales in 2015 (Thursday Jul. 16, 2015)
  Market revenues associated with network communications, sensing, and control functions in subsystems and objects attached to the Internet of Things (IoT) are forecast to grow 29% in 2015 to $62.4 billion after increasing 21% in 2014 to about $48.4 billion.
  
  
• Globalfoundries' CEO: Why FD-SOI and Why Now (Tuesday Jul. 14, 2015)
  With its latest news Globalfoundries Inc. has not only confirmed itself as a supporter of the fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) approach to IC manufacturing but that it also thinks sufficiently highly of the technology that it wants it own exclusive processes to address a swathe of low power applications.
  
  
• China Bids $23B for Micron (Tuesday Jul. 14, 2015)
  In a bold move to put China at the forefront of semiconductors, Tsinghua Unigroup bid $23 billion to buy Micron Technology. The deal would fill one of the biggest strategic holes in China’s chip industry but is expected to raise political issues all the way to the U.S. White House.
  
  
• Open Source Core Advances (Monday Jul. 13, 2015)
  A recent Berkeley workshop highlighted advances with RISC-V, an open source core already showing architectural advantages over commercial x86 and ARM cores.