Not yet a year into Rory Read’s term and the AMD board must be considering that the value of the x86 patents and engineering talent is worth much more than the stocks $3B valuation and easier to fathom putting on the auction block than continuing to sell $25 processors into the back channels of China and the Developing World. As I read… Read More
Qualcomm has a nice problem to have: too much demand for its Snapdragon and 4G LTE baseband parts. How Qualcomm realigns its manufacturing strategy around this problem will determine whether or not they can breakaway from the ARM camp and go toe to toe with Intel. Last week Malcolm Penn claimed TSMC was too big to fail. Really? The … Read More
Behind great humor often lies irony. In the midst of a struggle by the European Union to extract $1.3B from Intel in an ages old Anti-Trust case, the latter makes a strategic move to embolden the Dutch firm ASML to accelerate the development of 450mm and EUV and thus save a continental jewel. What now say EU? When disfunction and bankruptcy… Read More
Black Swan Events are not to be embraced, they are to be feared, if conventional wisdom holds true. And yet, the 2011 Black Swan that slammed the PC market (i.e. the Thailand Floods that wiped out a large part of the disk drive market) has turned out to be the key catalyst for reshaping the semiconductor industry in 2012 and 2013. Instead… Read More
Four years ago, a VC friend of mine was invited to a get together with a prominent Hedge Fund Manager from the Midwest. The meeting was an arrangement between fellow Harvard Grads. The Fund Manager was looking to make investments in the valley, to diversify away from his heavily weighted financial positions. Though, not recognized… Read More
This just in from Tech Trader Daily, quoting Piper Jaffraychip analyst Gus Richard:
The whole issue for Qualcomm, based on Richard’s conversations with industry types, is that the company has started making its “MSM8960″ chip with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) only two to three quarters after TSM introduced… Read More
The world semiconductor market declined 2.2% in 1Q 2012 from 4Q 2011, according to WSTS. The market ended 2011 on a down slide, with 4Q 2011 down 7.7% from 3Q 2011. The year 2011 semiconductor market was up only 0.4%.
Three major events contributed to the weakness in 2011:
[LIST=1]
You can see a lot just by looking – as Yogi Berra was quoted as saying. The past two weeks we have seen quite a bit that adds intrigue to the true nature of Qualcomm’s 28nm product shortage and how the effects will ripple through the mobile industry for the second half of 2012. Samsung’s bold announcement of their Galaxy S III smartphones… Read More
First the good news: 4G LTE design in activity is off the charts as OEMs building smartphones, tablets and Ultrabooks are buying into the capability for product rollouts that will occur starting in September. Now the bad news: there’s not enough to go around until probably well into 2013. For a Company sitting on over $26B in cash,… Read More
The second day (more like a half-day) of EDPS was devoted to 3D ICs. There was a lot of information, too much to summarize in a few hundred words. The keynote was by Riko Radojcic of Qualcomm, who has been a sort of one-man-band attempting to drive the EDA and manufacturing industries towards 3D. Of course it helps if you don’t … Read More
