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Commentary / Analysis

• The Automotive Infotainment segment is mirroring the smartphone ecosystem: Guru Ganesan, Managing Director, ARM India (Wednesday Jul. 16, 2014)
  Guru Ganesan, Managing Director, ARM India, shares interesting details on the role chip makers like ARM can play in the connected car future
  
  
• EDA Consortium Reports Revenue Increase For Q1 2014 (Wednesday Jul. 16, 2014)
  The EDA Consortium (EDAC) Market Statistics Service (MSS) today announced that the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry revenue increased 4.6 percent for Q1 2014 to $1746.1 million, compared to $1668.5 million in Q1 2013.
  
  
• Tablet Apps Processor Revenue Grew 30 Percent in Q1 2014 says Strategy Analytics (Wednesday Jul. 16, 2014)
  The global tablet applications processor market registered an impressive 30 percent year-over-year growth to reach $912 million in Q1 2014, according to Strategy Analytics Handset Component Technologies (HCT) service report, “Tablet Apps Processor Market Share Q1 2014: Apple Maintains Lead with 30 Percent Revenue Share.”
  
  
• IBM Preps for Post-Silicon Era (Wednesday Jul. 16, 2014)
  A post-silicon era is coming quickly, a veteran semiconductor executive at IBM said after his company announced it will spend as much as $3 billion in the next five years on R&D programs to drive to and beyond the limits of silicon.
  
  
• After Moore's Law: More With Less (Monday Jul. 14, 2014)
  In the decades when Moore’s Law went unquestioned, the industry was able to migrate to the next smaller node and receive access to more devices that could be used for increased functionality and additional integration. While less significant transistor-level power savings have been seen from the more recent nodes, as leakage currents have increased, the additional levels of integration have brought down or eliminated many of the most power-hungry functions.
  
  
• Can Samsung Get Qualcomm in LTE Market? (Monday Jul. 14, 2014)
  Samsung took the wraps off a new LTE radio chip this week. The chip, supporting both FDD and TDD, is built on the 28-nm HKMG process. It's noteworthy that Samsung has integrated its own quad-core application processor and called it Exynos ModAP.
  
  
• Apple begins receiving shipments of A-series processors from TSMC - report (Monday Jul. 14, 2014)
  Following years of rumors, chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has begun production of Apple's A-series processors and the chips are now making their way to assembly plants, according to a Thursday morning report from Hong Kong
  
  
• Smartphone Apps Processor Revenue Reached $4.7 Billion in Q1 2014 says Strategy Analytics (Monday Jul. 14, 2014)
  The global smartphone applications processor market registered an impressive 25 percent year-over-year growth to reach $4.7 billion in Q1 2014, according to Strategy Analytics Handset Component Technologies (HCT) service report.
  
  
• TSMC Said to Ship Apple SoCs (Friday Jul. 11, 2014)
  Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) began shipping mobile processors to Apple during the second quarter of this year and will continue through 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported.
  
  
• Startup Preps Neural Network Visual Processor for Mobiles (Thursday Jul. 10, 2014)
  TeraDeep Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) was formed in 2013 as a spin off from Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana) to commercialize research into multilayer convolutional neural networks as a means of efficient processing for such tasks as cognitive vision processing.
  
  
• IP And FinFETs At Advanced Nodes (Thursday Jul. 10, 2014)
  Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss IP and finFETs at advanced nodes with Bernard Murphy, CTO of Atrenta; Warren Savage, president and CEO of IPextreme; Aveek Sarkar, vice president of engineering and product support at Ansys-Apache; Randy Smith, vice president of marketing at Sonics. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.
  
  
• Gartner Says Worldwide Semiconductor Sales on Pace to Total $336 Billion in 2014, a 6.7 Percent Increase from 2014 (Thursday Jul. 10, 2014)
  Worldwide semiconductor revenue is on pace to reach $336 billion in 2014, a 6.7 percent increase from 2013, and up from the previous quarter's forecast of 5.4 percent growth, according to Gartner, Inc. Sequential growth in the second quarter of 2014 is outpacing expectations, as can be seen in many companies including foundry leader TSMC, which is expecting second-quarter sequential growth of over 20 percent.
  
  
• Gartner Says Worldwide Semiconductor Capital Equipment Spending to Increase 15 Percent in 2014 (Wednesday Jul. 09, 2014)
  Worldwide semiconductor capital equipment spending is projected to total $38.5 billion in 2014, an increase of 15 percent from 2013 spending of $33.5 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. Capital spending will increase 7.1 percent in 2014 as the industry begins to recover from the recent economic downturn and total spending will follow a generally increasing pattern in all sectors through 2018.
  
  
• SEMI Forecasts Back-to-Back Years of Double-Digit Growth in Chip Equipment Spending (Tuesday Jul. 08, 2014)
  SEMI projects back-to-back years of double-digit growth in worldwide semiconductor equipment sales according to the mid-year edition of the SEMI Capital Equipment Forecast, released here today at the annual SEMICON West exposition.
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Sales Increase Across All Regions in May (Monday Jul. 07, 2014)
  SIA today announced that worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $26.86 billion for the month of May 2014, 8.8 percent higher than the May 2013 total of $24.69 billion and 2.0 percent more than last month’s total of $26.34 billion.
  
  
• Gartner Says Worldwide Traditional PC, Tablet, Ultramobile and Mobile Phone Shipments to Grow 4.2 Percent in 2014 (Monday Jul. 07, 2014)
  Worldwide combined shipments of devices (PCs, tablets, ultramobiles and mobile phones) are projected to reach 2.4 billion units in 2014, a 4.2 percent increase from 2013 (see Table 1), according to Gartner, Inc.
  
  
• ARM's Mali Midgard Architecture Explored (Monday Jul. 07, 2014)
  So far this is shaping up to be a banner year for SoCs. From a market perspective the mobile hardware space is still in a period of significant growth, but more importantly from a hardware point of view these products and especially the GPUs in these products have made significant strides in performance and in features.
  
  
• China's SMIC-Qualcomm 28-nm Deal: Why Now? (Friday Jul. 04, 2014)
  China's largest foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), and Qualcomm, the world's most dominant baseband cellular processor company, revealed Thursday, July 3 that they are collaborating on 28-nm wafer production in China.
  
  
• Cortex-M0 Gets Nearer to Near Threshold (Thursday Jul. 03, 2014)
  Intellectual property licensor ARM continues to make progress on the near-threshold voltage operation of processor cores in research but it will be down tp ARM licensees to implement Cortex-M0 cores for such low voltage operation, according to Mike Muller, chief technology officer, of ARM Holdings plc.
  
  
• China, Not Apple, Is Way to Go, Says mCube CEO (Wednesday Jul. 02, 2014)
  Fabless inertial sensor startup mCube Inc. is just about to enter phase three of a startup's progress. That's why it has just secured $37 million of Series C venture capital, CEO Ben Lee told EE Times Europe.
  
  
• IC Suppliers Shift Strategies to Counter Decline in Digital Still Cameras (Wednesday Jul. 02, 2014)
  Almost as quickly as they took over, stand-alone digital cameras are now being displaced by camera-equipped cellphones, which have improved significantly in picture-taking quality and, more importantly, can immediately send copies of electronic photos by e-mail or post them on the Internet.
  
  
• Silicon Highway Narrows, Twists (Monday Jun. 30, 2014)
  The semiconductor road map is becoming as narrow and twisting as a mountain road, according to executives at two capital equipment companies. Chip vendors face higher costs and complexities due to tighter margins, new processes, and materials at 20 nm and beyond, they say.
  
  
• Electronics growth positive around the world (Monday Jun. 30, 2014)
  Electronics production growth has turned positive in 2014 for all key geographic regions. The graph below shows three-month-average change versus a year ago for electronics production in local currency through April 2014. Total industrial production is used for Europe (EU countries) and South Korea since electronic production data is not available.
  
  
• R&D Crisis Ahead? (Thursday Jun. 26, 2014)
  Too many choices and uncertainty turn ROI for new chip architectures into riskier gambles—and force a rethinking of what’s next.
  
  
• IC Manufacturers Close or Repurpose 72 Wafer Fabs from 2009-2013 (Wednesday Jun. 25, 2014)
  Semiconductor manufacturers closed 72 wafer fabs between 2009-2013 and another nine fabs are slated to close in 2014, according to data recently compiled, updated, and now available in IC Insights’ Strategic Reviews online database and the Global Wafer Capacity 2014 report.
  
  
• Intel Follows Qualcomm Down Neural Network Path (Wednesday Jun. 25, 2014)
  One of the reasons Intel Corp. is interested in putting FPGA die next to its Xeon processors is so that it can deploy neural networks along side its x86 processors. Of course, in the longer term Intel could try to go for monolithic implementation of CPU cores and FPGA fabric if it can obtain the appropriate IP.
  
  
• Intel to Package FPGA with Xeon Processor (Monday Jun. 23, 2014)
  Intel is integrating its Xeon processor with an FPGA in a single-package that will be socket-compatible with previous Xeon E5 processors.
  
  
• Russian government telegraphs move to ARM (Monday Jun. 23, 2014)
  The Russian Ministry of Industry is claimed to be investigating the creation of a homebrew processor based on the ARM architecture, as a replacement for foreign-produced x86 chips from Intel and AMD.
  
  
• Why MIPS? Imagination Makes Its Case (Thursday Jun. 19, 2014)
  Does the industry know everything it needs to know about MIPS? Most industry analysts think they do. And they’re probably right. MIPS processor cores’ architecture and its power-efficient performance are an integral part of the well told MIPS legacy.
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts May 2014 Book-to-Bill Ratio of 1.00 (Thursday Jun. 19, 2014)
  North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.41 billion in orders worldwide in May 2014 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.00, according to the May EMDS Book-to-Bill Report published today by SEMI. A book-to-bill of 1.00 means that $100 worth of orders were received for every $100 of product billed for the month.