It’s just a matter of time – perhaps just a few months – before the greatest mystery of the semiconductor industry is revealed and the peaceful co-existence of the Fab vs Fabless world is blown apart. An arms race was started by Intel to challenge TSMC and Samsung on who would control not only the high valued processor but soon… Read More
Some call it co-opetition (collaborative competition), some call it keeping your enemies close. Others call it for what it is, unfair competition and/or other types of legally actionable behavior. GlobalFoundries calls it“Fab Syncing”, which in reality will SINK their FABS!
“With this new collaboration, we are making one … Read More
During the weekend, I read two articles that highlighted Apple’s LCD supply chain build out and started to think of how this would look if Apple were to do the same on the x86 side of the ledger. The two articles, one related to Hitachi and Sony building a new 4” LCD for iphones and a more extensive one on Sharp building a new LCD for the iPAD3… Read More
The text of this very first article about Arteris had disapeared from Semiwiki, for an absolutely unknowed reason…If you have missed it, this is a pretty useful introduction to NoC concept, as well as to the legal battle between Arteris and Sonics:
The Network on Chip is a pretty recent concept. Let’s try to understand how … Read More
Vertical integration, as I have noted in previous blogs, is the way to domination and maximum profitability. That is unless someone else has beaten you to the punch with an even bettermodel. Apple is now executing a product and manufacturing supplier strategy that will force Samsung to lose lots of money and then ultimately split… Read More
Apple will purchase close to eightBILLION dollars in parts from Samsung for the iSeries of products this year alone, making Apple Samsung’s largest customer. Samsung is also Apple’s largest competitor and TSMC’s most viable competitive foundry threat so it was no surprise to see Apple and TSMC team up on the next generations of… Read More
What’s going on in all these wireless patent battles? And why?
The first thing to understand is that implementing most (all?) wireless standards involves infringing on certain “essential patents.” The word “essential” means that if you meet the standard, you infringe the patent, there is no way around it. You can’t build a CDMA… Read More
The mobile devices market is simply exploding, with smartphones shipmentgoing up to the sky, tabletsemerging so fast that some people think it will replace PC (but this is still to be confirmed…). This lead mobile SoC designs to integrate increasingly more features, to support customer needs for more computing power and sophisticated… Read More
The retirement of Steve Jobs left most commentators wondering if Tim Cook could lead Apple marching ever onward and upward. In truth, Tim Cook’s contribution on the operations side has been just as instrumental in the destruction of Apple’s PC and consumer electronics competitors as Jobs’ product vision. Under Tim Cook’s guidance,… Read More
We received some good feedback from our article on Intel’s Back to the Future Buy of Micron and I thought I would present another story line that gives readers a better perspective of what may be possibly coming down the road. In this case, it is the story of AMD and Samsung partnering to counter Intel’s platform play with Micron. The… Read More
