One of my favorite pastimes is listening to the quarterly investor calls of the leading semiconductor companies. I can then match up the talking points with the calls I do with Wall Street, the conferences I attend, and the other data points I have collected while working inside the fabless semiconductor ecosystem for more than … Read More
Tag: semiconductors
Stressed out about Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) or Electrical Overstress (EOS)?
Do not lose sleep worrying that your integrated circuits might fail during EOS/ESD events. Join us for the 38th annual EOS/ESD Symposium in Anaheim, CA in September. Experts on the field will address the latest research on EOS and ESD in the rapidly changing world of electronics.
As electronics continue to become commonplace in… Read More
ASML pays $3.1B for Hermes to get E-beam inspection
Cheap versus year ago but expensive on fundementals – Net negative for KLAC/LRCX & AMAT. ASML bought Hermes Microvision for much the same reason as the Cymer acquisition – to support EUV. ASML could have made a counter offer for KLAC (as we had suggested previously) but this obviously would have been much more expensive… Read More
Semiconductor market going negative?
Several recent forecasts for the 2016 semiconductor market point to a decline. The title of this post is the same as we used for in October 2015. In October, Semiconductor Intelligence projected the market would grow 1.0% in 2015 despite several predictions of the market going negative. 2015 finished with a slight 0.2% decline.… Read More
Intel’s New Strategy Is The Right One For The Company
Intel has been the focus of a lot of attention in the last week due to the company’s major restructuring announcement which came on the heels of Intel’s most recent earnings announcement. The majority of analyses that immediately followed the company’s announcement focused singularly on the layoffs, which amount to 11% of the … Read More
Free Webinar: Designing Low-Power IoT Systems
As I have written before, IoT looks to be a key driver for design starts and future semiconductor revenue growth which is why we wrote “PROTOTYPICAL” and included a field guide to FPGA Prototyping. If you want to get funding for your new IoT chip project, having a working prototype is a good thing, absolutely. If you want to take a look… Read More
TSMC Update at #53DAC!
TSMC is having an interesting year for sure. I was at the TSMC Symposium in Hsinchu last week and everyone was talking about the new 16FFC process. Silicon is out and it is exceeding expectations leading some people (me included) to believe that TSMC 16FFC will be the next TSMC 28nm in regards to popularity. To be clear, 16FFC is currently… Read More
Stop FinFET Design Variation @ #53DAC and get a free book!
If you plan on visiting Solido (the world leader in EDA software for variation-aware design of integrated circuits) at the Design Automation Conference next month for a demonstration of Variation Designer, register online now and get an autographed copy of “Mobile Unleashed”. Such a deal!
Solido Variation Designer is used by… Read More
Semiconductor capital spending slow in 2016
The outlook for semiconductor capital expenditures (capex) in 2016 is weak. Gartner’s January 2016 forecast called for a decline of 4.7%. IC Insights in February projected a 0.8% decline. The table below shows the Gartner forecast along with the capex forecasts from the top three spenders (Intel, Samsung and TSMC) which… Read More
Ecosystem Partnership for Effective Network Hardware Design
When you’re designing a hardware solution to plug into what is arguably the most complex system of all – the Internet – you can’t get away with a little fake traffic to test whether your box is going to do all the right things at the right performance. You have to model realistic voice, video, data and wireless traffic in… Read More