As I said yesterday, I’m at the imec Technology Forum (ITF) in Brussels. So what have I learned from all the people that I’ve interacted with.
There were two press releases announced at a press conference yesterday. The first was that imec was expanding its relationship with Toshiba and Sandisk. This covers bringing… Read More
Pretty much out of nowhere UMC let fly a press release about taping out a 14nm test chip with ARM and Synopsys IP which was quickly followed by an SMIC 14nm press release about a joint venture with Huawei, Qualcomm, and imec. It caught me a bit by surprise since I spent time with both UMC and SMIC at #52DAC and nothing was mentioned. Of course… Read More
Because it is such a major impact on the semiconductor industry, being the largest and fastest growing market ever, I follow the ups and down of the mobile industry. So what happened in Q1?
Total shipments are up 2% to a record (for Q1) 440 million units but that is down 16% from Q4 which remains the biggest quarter ever.
First thing is… Read More
Last week was the Linley Mobile Conference. Mobile is a huge semiconductor market and, outside of Intel, is the main driver for next generation process technologies. A new generation of mobile phones comes along, fills the leading edge fabs for a year or two and then moves on to the next generation. Nothing comes close to requiring… Read More
As we left an exciting year 2014 which is poised to record 7+ % increase in semiconductor revenue (~ $338 B) compared to 2013 (~ $315 B) and entered into another promising year 2015 for semiconductors, I looked back over the year bygone and collected inferences from some of the major important events which clearly convey how 2015 can… Read More
As smartphone and tablet makers desperately search for points of differentiation they will try to push the limits of performance on several fronts to extremes. The password pill and the display-cover display are two of the stranger extreme features on the way.
Extreme inter-connectivity is one of the more useful features that… Read More
Until recently, talking about smartphone incredible shipment growth was understood as shipments of A5 iPhone or Galaxy Note, and this was true. Devices priced at $500 or more are shipping like baguette in Paris, but this fact is only true in Europe, Korea, Japan or USA. Does that means that people living populated countries like… Read More
The numbers for smartphone sales in Q3 are starting to roll in. These are in units and not yet revenue (let alone profit) numbers although everyone down to Sony is for sure profitable. Samsung is running away with the volume, selling more than Apple, Huawei and Sony put together. One name that is missing is Motorola (Google) which … Read More
The Q2 numbers for smartphones are now all in and the basic story is that Google is now registering an incredible million Android phones per day, half of them made by Samsung. That’s 85% of all the smartphones shipped last quarter. Android has (per IDC) 68% market share of all smartphones out there.
Apple grew by double digit… Read More
This time is differentis a book that was released just months before the financial crises in 2008 describing hundreds of historical cases where smart people ended up making disastrous decisions over the span of 800 years that led to government defaults, banking panics etc… In the semiconductor industry, we also tend to think this… Read More
