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Commentary / Analysis

• Intel to offer RISC-V core in 7nm foundry (Thursday Jun. 24, 2021)
  Intel is to offer a new RISC-V core from SiFive, the 64bit P550, to mutual customers using its 7nm foundry process.
  
  
• U.S. Blocks Chinese Deal for Magnachip (Wednesday Jun. 23, 2021)
  A U.S. interagency panel has moved to block the acquisition of a South Korean chipmaker by a Chinese investor, signaling what observers say is a significant expansion of U.S. jurisdiction in curtailing Chinese access to strategic semiconductor technologies.
  
  
• Rebooting Imagination: A Heterogeneous Compute Strategy (Monday Jun. 21, 2021)
  Last October, Imagination Technologies hired a new CEO, Simon Beresford-Wylie. He is Imagination’s sixth CEO in 6 years, and just like his predecessors he is committed to building on the company’s heritage in GPUs. The biggest question is if Beresford-Wylie can come up with a different way to do the same thing, only this time leading to sustained success.
  
  
• Qualcomm, MediaTek Fill Vacuum HiSilicon Left in Smartphones (Thursday Jun. 17, 2021)
  Qualcomm and MediaTek have plugged the gap that Huawei left when the US government effectively forced Huawei subsidiary HiSilicon out of the smartphone chip business last year as part of the trade war between China and the US.
  
  
• IC Insights Raises Its 2021 Worldwide IC Market Forecast to +24% (Wednesday Jun. 16, 2021)
  After dropping 8% in 2019, the analog IC market registered a small 3% increase in 2020. For 2021, the analog market is expected to surge and display 25% growth with a 20% jump in unit shipments.
  
  
• IPO Arm, says Qualcomm boss, and we'll buy in (Monday Jun. 14, 2021)
  If the Nvidia-Arm deal falls foul of regulatory scrutiny and then Softbank decided to IPO it, Qualcomm would be prepared to buy a stake in Arm alongside other tech companies, says Qualcomm’s CEO.
  
  
• Intel said to have offered $2bn for SiFive (Friday Jun. 11, 2021)
  Intel is reported by Reuters to have offered $2billion to buy six year-old RISC-V chip designer SiFive.
  
  
• GPU Market Headed for a Fall? (Friday Jun. 11, 2021)
  The rollercoaster ride that is the graphics chip market is likely to see an abrupt end to pandemic-driven surge demand driven by seasonal factors, a supply chain “hangover” and rampant speculation.
  
  
• SambaNova CEO: Pre- to Post-AI Transition Will Be "Bigger Than the Internet" (Friday Jun. 11, 2021)
  Data center AI chip and system startup SambaNova hit the headlines recently with an enormous Series D funding round of $676 million, pushing the 100-person company’s valuation above $5 billion, a staggering amount for a young company which only emerged from stealth at the end of 2020.
  
  
• Global Semiconductor Sales Increase 1.9% Month-to-Month in April; Annual Sales Projected to Increase 19.7% in 2021, 8.8% in 2022 (Thursday Jun. 10, 2021)
  SIA today announced worldwide sales of semiconductors were $41.8 billion in April 2021, an increase of 1.9% from the March 2021 total of $41.0 billion and 21.7% more than the April 2020 total of $34.4 billion.
  
  
• IBM, GlobalFoundries in Breach-of-Contract Spat (Wednesday Jun. 09, 2021)
  IBM is suing GlobalFoundries for breach of contract and is asking for $2.5 billion in damages. IBM made GlobalFoundries aware of the suit, but informed EE Times it hasn’t filed it in court yet, and so is not yet prepared to share it publicly.
  
  
• TSMC's Chip Scaling Efforts Reach Crossroads at 2nm (Wednesday Jun. 09, 2021)
  Perpetuating Moore’s Law — the observation that the transistor density in a typical chip doubles every two years — poses a number of challenges at the 3nm node, yet Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (TSMC) remains optimistic.
  
  
• Automotive IC Marketshare Slips in 2020 After Steady Gains Since 1998 (Wednesday Jun. 09, 2021)
  In this month’s June Update to The McClean Report, IC Insights will present its forecast for IC usage by major product type and end-use application (i.e., computer, communications, consumer, automotive, industrial, and government/military) through 2025.
  
  
• TSMC's Zhang: Automotive is Going HPC (Thursday Jun. 03, 2021)
  Among the new process nodes introduced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. at its 2021 Virtual Technology Symposium was N5A, which the company said is “aimed at satisfying the growing demand for computing power in newer and more intensive automotive applications such as AI-enabled driver assistance and the digitization of vehicle cockpits.”
  
  
• Texas Instruments Continues As World's Top Analog IC Supplier (Thursday Jun. 03, 2021)
  With analog sales of $10.9 billion and 19% marketshare, Texas Instruments maintained its firm grip as the leading supplier of analog devices in 2020. TI’s analog sales increased about $650 million or 6% compared to 2019.
  
  
• Quarterly Revenue of Top 10 Foundries Breaks Records in 1Q21 Owing to Price Hikes Caused by Tight Foundry Capacities, Says TrendForce (Monday May. 31, 2021)
  The ranking of foundries by revenue for 1Q21 shows that TSMC maintained its first place position with a quarterly revenue of US$12.9 billion, a 2% increase QoQ. TSMC’s main revenue drivers have been its 7nm and 16/12nm nodes.
  
  
• Arm Upgrades Its Entire PC And Mobile Portfolio (Monday May. 31, 2021)
  Just over a month after refreshing its Neoverse infrastructure line of CPU cores, Arm released a flurry of new products aimed at PC and mobile applications.
  
  
• Arm battens down the spending hatches (Thursday May. 27, 2021)
  Arm has gone into cost reduction mode as it awaits the result of its takeover by Nvidia.
  
  
• Global 200mm Fab Capacity on Pace to Record Growth to Meet Surging Demand and Address Chip Shortage, SEMI Reports (Tuesday May. 25, 2021)
  Semiconductor manufacturers worldwide are on track to boost 200mm fab capacity by 950,000 wafers, or 17%, from 2020 through 2024 to reach a record high of 6.6 million wafers per month
  
  
• Top-15 Semi Companies Log Year-Over-Year Growth of 21% in 1Q21 (Tuesday May. 25, 2021)
  In total, the top-15 semiconductor companies’ sales surged by 21% in 1Q21 compared to 1Q20, three points greater than the total worldwide semiconductor industry 1Q21/1Q20 increase of 18%. Fourteen of the top-15 companies had semiconductor sales of at least $3.0 billion in 1Q21
  
  
• U.S. Chip Makers Embrace Collaboration (Monday May. 24, 2021)
  As Congress debates funding levels for reviving U.S. chip manufacturing, commercial partnerships are forming around strategic technologies such as 5G wireless and AI chips.
  
  
• Memory Upswing Returns, New Record High Expected in 2022 (Thursday May. 20, 2021)
  Fueled by economic recovery and the transition to a digital economy, memory IC sales are forecast to reach $180.4 billion in 2022, exceeding the previous record high set in 2018.
  
  
• Shift from 8'' Wafer Fabs to 12'' Could Ease IC Shortages (Wednesday May. 19, 2021)
  To put it mildly, the 8-inch (200mm) wafer supply chain is somewhat struggling.
  
  
• Aphawave shares remain below offer price (Tuesday May. 18, 2021)
  Alphawave, the Canadian wired connectivity semiconductor IP specialist which IPO’d last week has not recovered from the crash which saw its shares dip 21% below the 410p offer price hit 369p yesterday.
  
  
• South Korea plans US$450 billion semiconductor spend (Monday May. 17, 2021)
  South Korea has a plan for the country to spend $450 billion on logic chipmaking and R&D up to 2030, according to Bloomberg.
  
  
• AI Startups Plateau, AI SoCs Soar, and the Edge Diverges (Monday May. 17, 2021)
  While the tech industry continues to tout a “renaissance” of artificial intelligence, the number of AI chip startups has begun to plateau. AI startups are finding that the entry barriers to datacenters, once a promising market, are high — perhaps prohibitively so.
  
  
• New Fab Plans: the Plot Thickens (Thursday May. 13, 2021)
  IBM (particularly the marketing team) deserves a healthy dose of congratulations for its announcement this week of a 2 nm test chip. The news was picked up far and wide, reported everwhere from The Verge to Fox News and in between.
  
  
• IBM Unveils World's First 2 nm Chip (Monday May. 10, 2021)
  IBM has unveiled the world’s first 2 nm chip, built at its R&D facility in Albany, New York. The test chip features gate-all-around transistors built with IBM’s nanosheet technology. Overall, IBM says the new process technology will enable 2 nm chips to achieve 45% higher performance or 75% lower power consumption than state-of-the art 7 nm chips in production today.
  
  
• Arm v9, the Next 10 Years (Thursday May. 06, 2021)
  About a month ago, Arm announced its next generation of architecture — V9. For the time being, the eighth iteration of the Arm architecture (ARMv8) is the most advanced architecture in the wild of system-on-chip (SoC) devices. We can expect a few leading SoC companies to begin the transition over the next year or so.
  
  
• Samsung Expected to Recapture #1 Semi Supplier Ranking in 2Q21 (Tuesday May. 04, 2021)
  After nearly a quarter of a century, the semiconductor industry saw a new #1 supplier beginning in 2017 when the memory market surged and Samsung displaced Intel. This unseating marked a milestone achievement not only for Samsung, but also for all other competing semiconductor producers who had tried for years to supplant Intel as the world’s largest supplier.