In 2015 Intel acquired Altera for $16.7B changing one of the most heated rivalries (Xilinx vs Altera) the fabless semiconductor ecosystem has ever seen. Prior to the acquisition the FPGA market was fairly evenly split between Xilinx and Altera with Lattice and Actel playing to market niches in the shadows. There were also two FPGA… Read More
Last week I attended the 2019 SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference. I gave two presentations, attended dozens of papers and conducted three interviews. I will be doing some detailed write ups particularly on EUV but I am waiting for the presentations from several of the papers. In the mean time I thought I would put some overall … Read More
The GLOBALFOUNDRIES story has been one of the more interesting ones inside the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. It started in 2008 when AMD announced a partnership with ATIC of Abu Dhabi to create a new joint venture company to become the world’s first truly global semiconductor foundry. On March 4[SUP]th[/SUP] of 2009 (happy… Read More
I was asked to present at Nikon’s LithoVision event again this year. LithoVision is held the day before the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference also in San Jose. The following is a write up of my talk.… Read More
Not as much new – No breakthrough announcements, 300 watts is better than 250 watts – Pellicle Problems, TSMC is EUV king – Third times a charm? We attended this years SPIE Lithography convention in San Jose as we have for many years. Although the show was quite enthusiastic and EUV was the central topic, as it has… Read More
ASML reported a more or less in line quarter as expected, coming in at EUR3.14B in revenues and EPS of EUR1.87. However, guidance was worse than most analysts were expecting with Q1 revenues expected to be EUR2.1B or down about one third.
This cut is something we have been talking about for a while as we have expected sharp memory CAPEX… Read More
TSMC has always been my bellwether and for 2019 I think we need to pay careful attention. Bad economic news has been spreading inside the fabless semiconductor ecosystem (tool and IP budgets have been tightening) but I think it is a bit premature. Let’s take a look at the TSMC 2018 Q4 earnings call and talk more about it in the comments… Read More
TSMC reported an in line quarter, as expected and also reported down Q1 guidance, also as expected. The only thing some investors may have been caught off guard about is the magnitude of the expected drop, 14%, from $9.4B to $7.35B. This is the largest quarter over quarter drop for TSMC in a very long time. Importantly for TSMC, 7NM … Read More
Over the holidays I did an interview with CNBC on the subject of Qualcomm. The producer had read the History of Qualcomm chapter in our book Mobile Unleashed and wanted to base a 15 minute report on it. The interview lasted 90 minutes but of course only snippets of what I said were used. You can see the recorded report by clicking on the… Read More
We attended the Needham Growth Conference which is one of the first conferences of the year and in the quiet period before most companies reported so even though there was no “official” comment from most companies on the quarter, the surrounding commentary spoke volumes:
