Production of electronic equipment is healthy based on July and August data. China, the largest electronics producer, showed three-month-average change versus a year ago (3/12) of 13.8% in August. Growth for China has been in the 12% to 15% range since January 2017, picking up from the 8% to 11% range in 2016. South Korea’s electronics… Read More
Custom SoC Platform Solutions for AI Applications at the TSMC OIP
The TSMC OIP event is next week and again it is packed with a wide range of technical presentations from TSMC, top semiconductor, EDA, and IP companies, plus long time TSMC partner and ASIC provider Open-Silicon, a SiFive Company. You can see the full agenda HERE.
AI is revolutionizing and transforming virtually every industry… Read More
More Negative Semiconductor News
The amount of negative news and information about the semiconductor industry seems to be increasing at a faster rate. Micron put up a better quarter than expected but more importantly guided less than expected. We are surprised that the street is surprised as the decline in memory pricing is well known and Micron has been clear about… Read More
Semiconductor IP Reality Check
A robust, proven library of IP is a critical enabler for the entire semiconductor ecosystem. Without it, ASIC design is pretty much impossible, given time-to-market pressures. Said another way, designing IP for your next chip simply doesn’t fit the schedule – most teams have barely enough time to integrate and validate pre-existing… Read More
Is the Q4 Bounce Back now a 2009 Recovery?
Last week saw a unique confluence of events that continue the negative news flow in semicap following the story about GloFo. At a financial conference, Micron’s CFO said NAND prices were declining, this was on top of an analyst note in the morning about the same issue. Even though this should be no surprise as memory has had … Read More
Turnkey 2.5D HBM2 Custom SoC SiP Solution for Deep Learning and Networking Applications
Before we jump into the specifics, let us understand what’s driving custom solutions in the high performance computing and networking space. It’s the growing demand for core capacity and greater performance, which is due to the increase in the level of parallelism and multitasking required to handle the enormous amount of data… Read More
USB 3.x IP Revenue Have Grown by 31% in 2017 (IPnest)
Despite the strong consolidation in the semiconductor industry, the Design IP market is going well, very well with YoY growth of 12%+ in 2017, according with the “Design IP Report” from IPnest. If we look at the Interface IP category (20% growth in 2017) and analyze the IP revenues by protocols, we can see that USB IP is amazingly healthy,… Read More
The Ever-Changing ASIC Business
The cell-based ASIC business that we know today was born in the early 1980s and was pioneered by companies like LSI Logic and VLSI Technology. Some of this history is covered in Chapter 2 of our book, “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry”. The ASIC business truly changed the world. Prior to this revolution,… Read More
AMAT down 10% as expected Foundry spending slow down unexpected
Applied reported a more or less in line quarter, slightly beating weaker expectations. As we had projected, the October quarter is expected to have revenues down 10% which is at the low end of our expected 10-15% drop in business. Applied services helped partially make up for some of the equipment sales weakness. Revenue came in … Read More
Chip Stocks have been Choppy but China may return
Applied Materials (AMAT) is batting clean up in a quarter that has not been pretty. Lately semi stocks seem to have been hit by not only stock specific issues but continued and increasing memory concerns coupled with more macro issues. On top of all this, China trade issues which have in the meantime taken a back burner to other issues… Read More
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