Discounting the initial electronic or digital watch wave in 1970s which saw its sudden death sooner than expected, the recent Apple Watch event was the third attempt to invade the big watch market; the first being in 1999 and the second in 2012-13 led by Pebble. Although it’s stated that Apple sold about 3.6 million Smartwatches … Read More
Tag: samsung
Smartphone Penetration in Bali & Gili Islands
Whether you travel for business purpose or to stay for holidays in one of the paradise island part of the “Lesser Sunda Islands” like Bali or the Gili Meno, you always learn about mobile phone penetration. If you stay in one of the luxury resorts, populated by rich western or Chinese people, you probably don’t learn more than when walking… Read More
TSMC is the Top Dog in Pure-Play Foundry Business
We all have echoed the fact that the arrival of fabless business model in the semiconductor industry has transformed it completely. The book, “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” provides several stories around that. In the backdrop of that, one key point to ponder upon is the start of pure-play foundries;… Read More
FD-SOI: Samsung Opens the Kimono a Little
Last week there was a meeting of the GSA Analog/Mixed-Signal (AMS) working group. It was completely focused on FD-SOI (I hate that name, especially since FinFET is also fully-depleted. I vote for BoxFETs.) It was a bases loaded meeting with presentations from ST Microelectronics (calling in from France close to midnight), Samsung… Read More
Samsung Galaxy Unpacked
Apple announces their new products with much media attention to an audience of enthusiastic attendees, along with a live stream to all of us on the Internet who couldn’t be there in person. Samsung is following that same marketing playbook and today hosted an event in New York dubbed, “Everything Galaxy Unpacked 2015”… Read More
Why Qualcomm Lost Samsung and Will Get Them Back!
2016 will be a banner year for the System on Chip (SoC) industry. For the first time we will have leading edge SoCs (Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung) on the same manufacturing process enabling a true Apples to Apples comparison. Unfortunately, how we got there is being misrepresented by the media and analysts but that is Situation Normal… Read More
Meeting Demand as Fab Capacity is Stretched Again
Global semiconductor production capacity and its utilization level are key elements of the technology economy. During a panel at DAC in June Mentor Graphics posited that we are entering into a period where leading edge processes will be in high demand and also older nodes are seeing increasing demand due to Internet of Things designs… Read More
Make American Semiconductor Great Again!
As I watched the GOP debate between the top 10 candidates last week I asked myself which one of those men would I pick to help the United States stay competitive in the semiconductor industry. I’m saddened to say that the only candidate even remotely qualified for that conversation in my opinion is Donald Trump. Of course I backed Ross… Read More
China (and Cupertino) Are Killing Korea in Mobile
Samsung, #1 in the mobile phones based on unit shipments, has two big problems in mobile. Apple’s iPhone; and China in general and Huawei in particular in the Android world where they live. They have just announced their fifth quarter of decline. Revenue was down 8% year on year but operating profit declined 38%. They sold … Read More
A Key Aspect Missing for IoT to become NBT
The IoT (Internet of Things) is not one product, technology, segment, or market. It’s a combination of many things, many markets, and many technologies. However, it’s one thing that needs to connect everything together; edge device to gateway to cloud. That brings the complexity, how’s that possible amid large heaps of heterogeneous… Read More