On the first day of trading in the new year Apple just announced, after the close, that revenues will be lower than previously expected coming in at $84B versus the expected range of $89B to $93B and analyst estimates of the current quarter at $91.5B. Ugly….. The blame was laid squarely on China as slowing sales and trade tensions… Read More
For those who have been paying any attention to the semiconductor industry its no surprise that memory demand and therefore pricing is down from its peak earlier in the year. Its not getting better any time fast.
After several strong years of demand and pricing, which was followed by enormous CAPEX spending we are seeing the standard… Read More
Machine learning applications in data centers (or “the cloud”) have pervasively changed our environment. Advances in speech recognition and natural language understanding have enabled personal assistants to augment our daily lifestyle. Image classification and object recognition techniques enrich our social media experience,… Read More
We attended Semicon West Monday and Tuesday, the annual show for the semi equipment industry. Its very clear from discussions with all our sources in the industry that confirm that Samsung has put the brakes on spending on memory and that message was reinforced by declines in their expected profitability due to weaker memory pricing.… Read More
Maybe OMEC is the new OPEC? A bargaining chip in June trade show down?
China has started an apparent investigation into pricing of DRAM memory with Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix as targets. We find this somewhat coincidental given the current trade issues. Memory pricing has been unusually strong for a very long time. Much longer … Read More
At the Imec technology forum in Belgium Gouri Sankar Kar and Arnaud Furnemont presented memory and storage perspectives and I also got to interview Arnaud. Arnaud leads overall memory development at Imec and personally leads NAND and DNA research.
Memory research is focused on power, energy, speed and cost with energy and throughput… Read More
Samsung throws further gas on the fire of weak handset and CAPEX not set but will be down versus 2017. Samsung reported revenues of KRW 60.56 Trillion and KRW 15.64 Trillion operating profit ($56B and $15B). Chips accounted for whopping KRW 11.55 Trillion in operating profit on revenues of KRW 20.78 Trillion ( $11B and $19B)….a… Read More
I was invited to give a talk at the Business of Cleans Conference held by Linx Consulting in Boston on April 9th. I am not a cleans expert but rather was invited more to give an overview talk on process technology trends and the impact on cleans. In this write up I will discuss my presentation. I discussed each of the three main leading-edge… Read More
I was invited to present at Nikon’s LithoVision event held the day before the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference in San Jose. The following is a write up of the talk I gave. In this talk I discuss the three main segments in the semiconductor industry, NAND, DRAM and Logic and how technology transitions will affect lithography.… Read More
I was invited to give a talk at the ISS conference on the Impact of EUV on the Semiconductor Supply Chain. The ISS conference is an annual gathering of semiconductor executives to review technology and global trends. In this article I will walk through my presentation and conclusions.… Read More
