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Commentary / Analysis

• Microsemi Ships 22nm FinFET ASICs (Friday Sep. 19, 2014)
  Defense and communications chip supplier Microsemi Corp. (Aliso Viejo, Calif.) has started delivering ASICs to customers made using Intel's 22nm FinFET manufacturing process but is unlikely to ship FPGAs based on the process, according to Russ Garcia, executive vice president of marketing for the company.
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts August 2014 Book-to-Bill Ratio of 1.04 (Friday Sep. 19, 2014)
  North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.35 billion in orders worldwide in August 2014 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.04, according to the August EMDS Book-to-Bill Report published today by SEMI.
  
  
• 18 Views of the Silicon Horizon (Friday Sep. 19, 2014)
  The semiconductor industry will see "good but not great growth," with rates in the high single digits, in 2014 and beyond, according Bill McClean, president of the market watcher IC Insights.
  
  
• IP Subsystems in SoCs in Americas will grow to $340.5M by 2017, Says Semico Research (Tuesday Sep. 16, 2014)
  The IP subsystem is a new method designers will employ to infuse the right level of complexity and functionality to meet quickly changing market requirements without experiencing a corresponding increase in design costs or design cycle time. A new research report from Semico, The IP Subsystems Market: Evolution Continues and Momentum Builds, forecasts that the basic SoC IP subsystems segment will reach 351.1M units by 2017.
  
  
• Apple, Samsung in 20nm Race (Tuesday Sep. 16, 2014)
  Samsung was expected to be the first supplier to ship a 20nm smartphone SoC with its Exynos 5430, but Apple's just-announced iPhone 6 and 6 Plus run on their own 20nm A8 processor and will be available for sale Sept. 19.
  
  
• Asia-Pacific Dominates IC Sales in Largest System Categories in 2014 (Friday Sep. 12, 2014)
  Data presented in IC Insights Update to the 2014 IC Market Drivers report confirms Asia-Pacific’s firm grip as the dominant market for IC sales—a continuation of what has been a long and ongoing trend.
  
  
• Intel Opens Door on 7nm, Foundry (Thursday Sep. 11, 2014)
  Intel believes it can drive Moore’s Law down to 7 nm even without long-delayed advances in lithography. It also gave its most detailed look to date at its foundry service for sharing its chipmaking prowess, including a description of a new low-cost alternative to 2.5D chip stacking it has in development.
  
  
• Apple Could Be Driving TSMC's Record Sales (Thursday Sep. 11, 2014)
  Leading foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan) reported record sales in August 2014 of NT$69.28 billion (about $2.31 billion), a increase of 6.7 percent from July 2014 and an increase of 25.8 percent over August 2013.
  
  
• Mobile Operators Want SIMs in Every IoT Sensor (Thursday Sep. 11, 2014)
  Most outdoor sensors for utilities and city services are using M2M (machine to machine) solutions based on cellular networks. That poses a challenge to developers because they need to negotiate agreements with several cellular carriers in each market. Also the size of the SIM (subscriber identification module) cards limits the possibility of making smaller sensors and other connected devices.
  
  
• How Secure Is Your USB? (Tuesday Sep. 09, 2014)
  The recent report from researchers at Security Research Labs on the vulnerability of USB devices has seen equal amounts of soul searching and indignation from the industry. While the advice has been to make sure you use devices from trusted sources, some USB IP companies have been highlighting what device makers can do to ensure that their systems are secure.
  
  
• SEMI Reports Second Quarter 2014 Worldwide Semiconductor Equipment Figures; Billing US$ 9.6 Billion (Tuesday Sep. 09, 2014)
  SEMI today reported that worldwide semiconductor manufacturing equipment billings reached US$ 9.62 billion in the second quarter of 2014.
  
  
• Can China Buy Its Way Into Global IC Industry? (Monday Sep. 08, 2014)
  
  
  
• Total PC Shipments Seen Rising Despite Declines in Desktops, Notebooks (Friday Sep. 05, 2014)
  With touch-screen tablet computers dominating growth across the entire personal computing market, total shipments of personal computing systems (desktops, notebooks, tablets, and Internet/cloud units) are forecast to rise 12% in 2014 to 585 million units compared to 521 million in 2013.
  
  
• Soft (Hardware) and Software IP Rule the IoT (Thursday Sep. 04, 2014)
  Both soft (hardware) and software IP should dominate in the IoT market. But for which segments will that growth occur? See what the experts from IPExtreme, Atmel, GarySmithEDA, Semico Research and Jama Software are thinking.
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Market Maintains Broad, Consistent Growth in July (Thursday Sep. 04, 2014)
  SIA today announced that worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $28.1 billion for the month of July 2014, the industry’s highest-ever monthly sales total and an increase of 9.9 percent from July 2013 when sales were $25.5 billion.
  
  
• Andes Ready to Rumble in CPU War (Wednesday Sep. 03, 2014)
  With ARM reigning as king of the CPU IP market and Android dominating mobile operating systems, is there any room for anyone with new architectures to challenge these leaders’ well established ecosystems?
  
  
• MIPS Moves Multicore Battle to Clustering (Wednesday Sep. 03, 2014)
  Imagination Technologies has launched its I-class I6400 MIPS 64-bit processor with a focus on multithreading, multicore, and multicluster coherent processing that scales from a single core to hundreds.
  
  
• Imagination makes ARM's high end CPU goals less of a sure thing (Wednesday Sep. 03, 2014)
  This week Imagination released a new version of the MIPS architecture that should make ARMs's goals of competing with Intel in high end heterogeneous computing applications beyond mobile phones a bit more difficult. Nor will ARM have an easy time of it in many high end consumer and mobile apps as well, if Imagination has anything to do with it.
  
  
• Anatomy of an ARM Server Chip (Wednesday Sep. 03, 2014)
  The server market has been a battlefield where ARM has been bloodied in recent years. The collapse of Calxeda at the end of 2013 was a body blow, but the ecosystem is bouncing back, not least from the popularity of the ARMv8 64-bit architecture.
  
  
• Why FPGAs are a Good Fit for Automotive Driver Assistance Systems (Wednesday Sep. 03, 2014)
  With an increasing need for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) to be a flexible and reliable platform, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are becoming a logical fit for next-generation safety systems in automobiles.
  
  
• Semiconductor Market Setting Sales Records through the First Half of 2014 (Monday Sep. 01, 2014)
  As SIA reported earlier this month, worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $82.7 billion during the second quarter of 2014, marking the industry’s highest-ever second quarter sales total. In fact, there were other “highest ever” sales levels achieved with the release of the June 2014 data, including highest monthly sales ever and highest first half sales ever.
  
  
• Google's Project Ara Is Science Fiction, Says Critic (Thursday Aug. 28, 2014)
  Google’s Project Ara to develop a modular mobile smartphone is destined to remain nothing more than a science project, Richard Windsor, founder of the blog-site Radio Free Mobile and a former senior analyst at Nomura Securities, has warned in his blog.
  
  
• Data Centers May Ride on ASICs (Thursday Aug. 28, 2014)
  Big data centers will eventually run on custom ASICs, according to UC Berkeley Professor David A. Patterson, who is building a research system to show the way. Patterson described Firebox, a warehouse-scale computer targeted at 2020 in a keynote at Hot Interconnects here.
  
  
• Major IDMs Increasingly Rely on Foundries for Logic Production (Thursday Aug. 28, 2014)
  Arguably, no other trend has so quickly swept through the IC industry and stirred up so much debate about the future of chip making as the spread of fab-lite (or asset-lite) business model, which is being embraced by a growing number of major IDMs worldwide.
  
  
• Report: India, China show interest in Korean analog foundry (Monday Aug. 25, 2014)
  Hindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (HSMC) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC) are two of five groups that have expressed interest in acquiring analog and mixed-signal foundry Dongbu HiTek Co. Ltd. from troubled South Korean Dongbu Group, according to a Korea Herald report.
  
  
• Video Codecs in Close Battle (Monday Aug. 25, 2014)
  The battle between today's leading video codecs -- HEVC and VP9 -- will be a closer fight than we saw between the leaders in the prior generation, VP8 and AVC. There may be room in the market for both – at least in the short term.
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts July 2014 Book-to-Bill Ratio of 1.07 (Friday Aug. 22, 2014)
  North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.41 billion in orders worldwide in July 2014 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.07, according to the July EMDS Book-to-Bill Report published today by SEMI.
  
  
• JPR Reports AMD jumps 11% in GPU shipments in Q2, Intel up 4%, Nvidia slips (Thursday Aug. 21, 2014)
  Jon Peddie Research (JPR) announced estimated graphics chip shipments and suppliers’ market share for 2014 2Q.
  
  
• ARM Stressed in Server Bid (Wednesday Aug. 20, 2014)
  ARM-based servers are coming, but even more slowly and perhaps more narrowly than once thought, according to companies that expect to build and use them.
  
  
• Process Roadmap For Memory Devices Marches On as 3D Looms (Wednesday Aug. 20, 2014)
  The ongoing reduction in feature sizes used to manufacture integrated circuits has enhanced memory-chip performance by increasing per-chip storage capacities, lowering power consumption, and improving the speed in which memory devices can store and retrieve data (i.e., memory bandwidth).