D&R Headline News | Most Popular | SoC News Alerts | |

Commentary / Analysis

• 2014 Q2 Tablet Market Grows, as Apple and Samsung Disappoint says Strategy Analytics (Wednesday Aug. 20, 2014)
  
  
  
• Q&A: ARM Mobile Targets Wearables (Tuesday Aug. 19, 2014)
  Last week I had the opportunity to talk to David Maidment, mobile segment marketing manager at ARM, who is now focusing on the wearable market. He shared his views on this new exciting market for the company.
  
  
• Worldwide Smartphone Shipments Edge Past 300 Million Units in the Second Quarter; Android and iOS Devices Account for 96% of the Global Market, According to IDC (Monday Aug. 18, 2014)
  The worldwide smartphone market reached a new milestone in the second quarter of 2014 (2Q14), moving past the 300 million unit mark for the first time in its history. According to final data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors shipped a total of 301.3 million smartphones worldwide in 2Q14, up 25.3% from the 240.5 million units shipped in the second quarter of 2013.
  
  
• Bitcoin ASIC in Chips-to-$ Race (Monday Aug. 18, 2014)
  In eight short months, startup CoinTerra designed a 28nm ASIC that pushes the envelope in logic power density and shipped a system using four of them. Its tale is typical of the headlong race to hardware acceleration in the emerging bitcoin economy
  
  
• Microcontroller Sales Kick Into Gear Again After Slump (Thursday Aug. 14, 2014)
  2014 rebound in smartcard MCUs begins next wave of growth as the economy improves and new applications emerge, including the Internet of Things and wearable systems.
  
  
• Nvidia Flexes Custom 64-Bit ARM (Thursday Aug. 14, 2014)
  Nvidia has opened the hood on its custom 64-bit ARM core first announced in January 2011. "Denver" is an ARM processor that uses microcode to enable a novel execution optimizer.
  
  
• Microsoft Plugs FPGAs in Datacenter (Wednesday Aug. 13, 2014)
  Next year, Microsoft will start plugging Altera FPGA cards into new servers it deploys to run its Bing search service. Someday it might make such cards a standard part of the million servers in its datacenters.
  
  
• 400 Gbit Ethernet: The Next Leap (Tuesday Aug. 12, 2014)
  Growth and reliance on networking are permeating every aspect of our world. The needs of local area, data center, access, and metropolitan area networks are constantly growing, and we're seeing a rapid expansion in the number and use of new bandwidth-hogging applications. As a result, bandwidth growth is increasing across numerous applications and markets.
  
  
• Strong Growth in Second Quarter 2014 Silicon Wafer Shipments (Tuesday Aug. 12, 2014)
  Worldwide silicon wafer area shipments increased during the second quarter 2014 when compared to first quarter area shipments according to the SEMI Silicon Manufacturers Group (SMG) in its quarterly analysis of the silicon wafer industry.
  
  
• Changing The IP Supplier Paradigm (Thursday Aug. 07, 2014)
  Experts at the table: As the industry migrates from small blocks to larger integrated blocks and subsystems, it is having an impact on IP companies.
  
  
• IP Reaches Back To Established Nodes (Thursday Aug. 07, 2014)
  Driven by the IoT and wearable market opportunity, SoC developers are shifting backward to established nodes, and what is learned at the leading-edge nodes is being leveraged in reverse as IP is ported backward to improve functionality.
  
  
• MediaTek, AMD, and SK Hynix's 1H14 Sales Surge by more than 20%! (Thursday Aug. 07, 2014)
  The top 20 worldwide semiconductor (IC and O S D—optoelectronic, sensor, and discrete) sales ranking for 1H14 includes nine suppliers headquartered in the U.S., three in Japan, three in Europe, two in South Korea, two in Taiwan, and one in Singapore, a relatively broad representation of geographic regions.
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Industry on Pace for Record Sales Through First Half of 2014 (Tuesday Aug. 05, 2014)
  The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), representing U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing and design, today announced that worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $82.7 billion during the second quarter of 2014, an increase of 5.4 percent over the previous quarter and a jump of 10.8 percent compared to the second quarter of 2013.
  
  
• IBM, GF Explore New Partners (Tuesday Aug. 05, 2014)
  Like an old married couple, IBM and Globalfoundries are still great partners, but at this stage, they just have different needs. At least, that's the theory I am brewing after a long discussion with Semiconductor Advisors market watcher Robert Maire late Friday afternoon.
  
  
• MEMS imitates logic (Monday Aug. 04, 2014)
  There were those that said history would not repeat itself. But evidence continues to accumulate that the MEMS sector will follow a similar path to CMOS logic.
  
  
• Double Digit Growth of Cellular Radio Components Likely to Accrue to Top Suppliers Qualcomm, MediaTek, Skyworks, RFMD-TQS, Murata (Monday Aug. 04, 2014)
  Over the next five years, growth in cellular phones and related devices will push the market for cellular radio components to more than $45 billion led by basebands, power amplifiers and related front-end components, as detailed in "Cellular Radio Components Still On a Healthy Trajectory Through 2018" a new report from Strategy Analytics.
  
  
• A New Era for DRAM Bit Volume Growth (Monday Aug. 04, 2014)
  
  
  
• Globalfoundries Passes On IBM Chip Business, Says Report (Tuesday Jul. 29, 2014)
  IBM's efforts to sell off its chip unit appear to have broken down, with reports that Globalfoundries Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) is not interested in paying anywhere near IBM's asking price for its loss-making semiconductor division.
  
  
• Analog Unit Shipments Outpacing Growth of All IC Product Segments (Monday Jul. 28, 2014)
  The Mid-Year Update shows that between 2013 and 2018, analog unit shipments are forecast to grow at an average annual rate of 8.9%, faster than the 7.2% forecast for the total IC market and faster than all other major IC product categories
  
  
• IP Integration Challenges Rising (Monday Jul. 28, 2014)
  It’s not just lithography that is putting a crimp in sub-28nm designs. As more functions, features, transistors and software are added onto chips, the pressure to get chips out the door has forced chipmakers to lean more heavily on third-party IP providers.
  
  
• IP And FinFETs At Advanced Nodes - Part 2 (Thursday Jul. 24, 2014)
  Experts at the table, part 2: FinFETs become more complex at each new node; stacked die IP challenges; including the package in the simulation; local versus global design concerns.
  
  
• Android Open-Source for ARMv8-A Starts 64-Bit Avalanche (Wednesday Jul. 23, 2014)
  New 64-bit SOCs such as Qualcomm's Snapdragon 805 processor are expected to begin shipping this year, and the first products are expected to be commercially available in the first quarter of 2005, just in time for the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona.
  
  
• Mobile Uptick Ahead, Says ARM (Wednesday Jul. 23, 2014)
  Growth in mobile device shipments should come out of a slump in the second half of the year and generally stay in low double digits through 2018, according to ARM's chief executive, reporting on the company's latest quarterly results. He also commented on challenges ahead with Moore's Law and fragmentation in the Internet of Things.
  
  
• Failed merger talks won't stop Dialog (Wednesday Jul. 23, 2014)
  AMS, formerly known as Austriamicrosystems, and Dialog Semiconductor couldn't agree the terms of a merger, which feels like a missed opportunity for the two companies and for Europe. The outcome seems more dangerous for AMS than for Dialog. But what was the stumbling block?
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts June 2014 Book-to-Bill Ratio of 1.09 (Tuesday Jul. 22, 2014)
  North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.47 billion in orders worldwide in June 2014 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.09, according to the June EMDS Book-to-Bill Report published today by SEMI.
  
  
• 25G Ethernet on Tap at IEEE (Tuesday Jul. 22, 2014)
  In the wake of a June launch for an industry consortium that's driving 25 Gbit/s Ethernet for use in data centers, an IEEE 802.3 group voted last week to pursue a standard for the technology
  
  
• Has Intel's Technological Lead Exhausted? (Monday Jul. 21, 2014)
  Historically, Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC ) chip fabrication process has been more advanced than its peers'. The chipmaker, for instance, is the first to mass-manufacture computing chips based on a 22nm and 14nm FinFET lithography. This technological lead, in turn, has allowed Intel to repeatedly deliver impressive performance gains under a comparable power draw, before its peers.
  
  
• What Happened To 450mm? (Monday Jul. 21, 2014)
  There was a time not very long ago—one process node, in fact—when the economic momentum of Moore’s Law seemed unstoppable with a combination of extreme ultraviolet lithography, larger wafer sizes and a variety of new materials. Shrinking feature sizes is still technically possible, but certainly not with the same promised economic benefits and, at least for the foreseeable future, not with 450mm wafers.
  
  
• TSMC to Fall Behind Rivals in FinFET Market Share (Thursday Jul. 17, 2014)
  Morris Chang, chairman of foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan), has told analysts that his company would likely fall behind a "major competitor" in foundry market share for 16nm/14nm FinFET node in 2015, but would then go on to be market leader at 16nm/14nm in 2016 and subsequent years.
  
  
• Asia-Pacific Forecast to Strengthen Its Grip on Global ASIC Marketshare (Thursday Jul. 17, 2014)
  he Asia-Pacific region is forecast to increase its share of the ASIC market 17-percentage points from 2004 to 2014 and be the only region to significantly increase in ASIC marketshare, according to data compiled and soon to be released in IC Insights’ Mid-Year Update to the 2014 McClean Report.