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Commentary / Analysis

• Size of Semiconductor Acquisitions May Have Hit Limit (Thursday Aug. 16, 2018)
  Mega-mergers become less likely because of the high-dollar value of major acquisitions, increasing scrutiny from regulators, rising protectionism among more countries, and growing global trade frictions.
  
  
• Intel in the Cloud Post-Moore's Law (Monday Aug. 13, 2018)
  The decline of Moore’s Law affects the entire semiconductor industry, but perhaps no company more viscerally than the one that Gordon Moore co-founded. Here at its headquarters, Intel projected an upbeat image at a data center event, and it showed how profoundly the company is changing with the times.
  
  
• Startup AI Chip Passes Road Test (Monday Aug. 13, 2018)
  A startup will sample before June a 13W machine-learning accelerator for cars, robots and drones said to handily beat Nvidia GPUs in recognizing images. Visteon is considering using the chip in future automotive systems based on test results on an FPGA version of the device.
  
  
• DRAM Sales Forecast to Top $100 Billion This Year with 39% Market Growth (Friday Aug. 10, 2018)
  IC Insights recently released its Mid-Year Update to The McClean Report 2018. The update includes a revised forecast of the largest and fastest-growing IC product categories this year.
  
  
• Arm targets any number of devices and any type of data (Wednesday Aug. 08, 2018)
  Arm designed the blueprints for more than 100 billion chips installed in everything from smartphones and thermostats to industrial sensors and touchscreens in cars.
  
  
• India Startup Preps RISC-V, AI Cores (Wednesday Aug. 08, 2018)
  A startup in India announced ambitious plans to design and license RISC-V-based processor cores as well as deep-learning accelerators and SoC design tools. InCore Semiconductors will make its first cores available before the end of the year.
  
  
• Lessons from the Broadcom-Qualcomm Debacle (Monday Aug. 06, 2018)
  So, you thought Hock Tan was done? Not by a long shot. The Broadcom Inc. CEO isn’t your typical high-tech industry leader. That’s very clear now.
  
  
• Q'comm-NXP Break-Up: There Will Be Fallout (Monday Aug. 06, 2018)
  For two years, Qualcomm and NXP have been thinking about what they could do together. The two companies, independently, might have even delayed some key decisions, wondering how this potential merger might juice their customer base, technology expertise, and market share.
  
  
• Where Did Qualcomm Go Wrong? (Monday Aug. 06, 2018)
  Qualcomm found the villains elsewhere. Not at home. China, the negative environment, and “something that was above us” scuttled its $44 billion bid for NXP Semiconductor, as CEO Steve Mollenkopf reportedly framed it.
  
  
• Mid-Year Global Semiconductor Sales Up 20.4 Percent Compared to 2017 (Monday Aug. 06, 2018)
  SIA today announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $117.9 billion during the second quarter of 2018, an increase of 6.0 percent over the previous quarter and 20.5 percent more than the second quarter of 2017.
  
  
• Qualcomm Vets Join Blockchain RISC-V Chip Developer (Wednesday Aug. 01, 2018)
  LONDON — An organization developing what it claims is the world’s first blockchain chip and a network of hyper-scalable blockchain IoT networks to create an “intelligent machine economy” has taken on a number of former Qualcomm engineers to develop the chip and the ecosystem. The Skynet project, launched by the OpenSingularity Foundation, envisions a network of intelligent machines (as in the movie “Terminator”), utilizing blockchain, IoT, and AI to create secure trusted networks of devices that can intelligently communicate with each other autonomously and on a large scale. The organization says that this will enable billions of interconnected identifiable IoT devices to participate effortlessly in a global machine-to-machine (M2M) economy powered by self-organizing AI networks with data integrity facilitated by blockchains, which provide solutions for device identity, secure decentralized micro-payments, and trusted communication.
  
  
• Arm to Spend $600 Million to Widen IoT Ecosystem Offer (Tuesday Jul. 31, 2018)
  Processor IP vendor Arm is reported to be finalizing an agreement to acquire Mountain View, Calif.-based data analytics firm Treasure Data for $600 million. This follows its acquisition in June of Stream Technologies, a unified connectivity management platform for IoT devices, and its investment in San Jose-based SWIM.ai.
  
  
• Second Quarter 2018 Silicon Wafer Shipments Increase Quarter-Over-Quarter - All-Time Quarterly High (Monday Jul. 30, 2018)
  Reaching their highest recorded quarterly level ever on robust demand, worldwide silicon wafer area shipments rose 2.5 percent in the second quarter of 2018 to 3,160 million square inches from 3,084 million square inches the previous quarter
  
  
• Moore's Law, China vs. Team USA (Monday Jul. 30, 2018)
  The U.S. Department of Defense is pushing for a $2.2 billion program to fund a broad range of electronics efforts.
  
  
• Intel Claims Progress on 10nm Yields (Monday Jul. 30, 2018)
  Intel's stock value declined by more than 5 percent in after hours trading after the company reported better-than-expected overall sales for the second quarter, but came up short of analysts' targets for the closely watched data center product category.
  
  
• Qualcomm-NXP deal off (Thursday Jul. 26, 2018)
  As expected, China’s regulatory approval for the takeover of NXP by Qualcomm had not been received by the deadline of midnight New York time yesterday and the deal has been called off.
  
  
• Applied, ARM to develop CeRAM for neuromorphic applications (Thursday Jul. 26, 2018)
  Semiconductor manufacturing equipment maker Applied Materials Inc. has been selected by DARPA to work with ARM Ltd. and research firm Symetrix Corp. to develop a switch that functions like the neuron and synapses of the human brain, based on Correlated-Electron RAM (CeRAM) technology.
  
  
• North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts June 2018 Billings (Wednesday Jul. 25, 2018)
  North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $2.49 billion in billings worldwide in June 2018 (three-month average basis), according to the June Equipment Market Data Subscription (EMDS) Billings Report published today by SEMI.
  
  
• ESD Alliance Reports EDA Industry Revenue Increase For Q1 2018 (Tuesday Jul. 24, 2018)
  The Electronic System Design (ESD) Alliance Market Statistics Service (MSS) today announced that the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry revenue increased 7.8 percent for Q1 2018 to $2308.8 million, compared to $2142.5 million in Q1 2017.
  
  
• Samsung developing new GPU (Tuesday Jul. 24, 2018)
  The demand for talent and the talent’s demand for interesting challenges will never let up, especially in Silicon Valley. One such example is Dr. Chien-Ping Lu, or CP as he’s known among his friends.
  
  
• AI, China Dominate Semiconductor Funding (Tuesday Jul. 24, 2018)
  
  
  
• Android Wants to Be Truly Free (Monday Jul. 23, 2018)
  Thanks for Android, Google. Now it's time you let it go.
  
  
• Will Robocars Need More than Ethernet? (Monday Jul. 23, 2018)
  A cross-industry group promoting a standard called HDBaseT announced last week that Denso, a big tier one in Japan, has joined the group as a “contributor member.”
  
  
• Data Center Scaling at Breakneck Pace (Monday Jul. 23, 2018)
  Web giants are in a kind of Moore’s Law race to build ever-larger distributed computer networks. They are well along in writing new chapters for the computer science history books, but it’s unclear where the trend leads.
  
  
• Semi Content in Electronic Systems Forecast to Reach 31.4% in 2018 (Thursday Jul. 19, 2018)
  In its upcoming Mid-Year Update to The McClean Report 2018 (to be released at the end of July), IC Insights forecasts that the 2018 global electronic systems market will grow 5% to $1,622 billion while the worldwide semiconductor market is expected to surge by 14% this year to $509.1 billion, exceeding the $500.0 billion level for the first time.
  
  
• Is This the Moment for RISC-V? (Tuesday Jul. 17, 2018)
  At the GSA Executive Forum in Munich last month, Naveed Sherwani, CEO of SiFive, talked about the "democratization of silicon" as a result of deployment of open architectures, and how all microcontroller units will be based on RISC-V in the next three years.
  
  
• AI Becomes the New Moore's Law (Monday Jul. 16, 2018)
  Moore’s Law is dead, long live AI. That’s the semiconductor industry’s new rallying cry, sounded at a daylong symposium sponsored by Applied Materials at Semicon West.
  
  
• EDA Takes to the Cloud (Sort of) (Monday Jul. 09, 2018)
  The trend of EDA suppliers offering tools through the cloud was readily apparent at this year's Design Automation Conference (DAC), with the likes of Cadence, Mentor and others unveiling cloud-based offerings.
  
  
• Baidu Accelerator Rises in AI (Monday Jul. 09, 2018)
  China’s Baidu followed in Google’s footsteps this week, announcing it has developed its own deep learning accelerator. The move adds yet another significant player to a long list in AI hardware, but details of the chip and when it will be used remain unclear.
  
  
• Hardware: Golden Age or Golden Ager? (Monday Jul. 09, 2018)
  A Googler declares: "It's Golden age for hardware guys." I say, "Really?" We all sense radical changes afoot. I asked young engineers/researchers what they see as bottlenecks to innovation.