The European semiconductor industry is goimg fab-lite, on its way to becoming fabless, as NXP, then Infineon, now STMicroelectronics take the route to disposing of their leading edge manufacturing capability, it was stated at the IFS 2007 meeting in London today.
In the wake of the fab-lite strategies, possibly moving to fabless strategies, of NXP, Infineon, Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics, the pros and cons of having a fab were listed during IFS2007 in London this week organised by analysts Future Horizons.
Continue reading "Real men have fabs, but maybe not Infineon, NXP, TI and ST." »
War over bragging rights to being first to 45nm broke out this month with Intel and IBM claiming to be first out of the starting gate. TSMC, usually vocal in these contests, stayed mum.
Continue reading "Who's first to 45nm? Intel, IBM or . . . . ." »
Are the present generation of managers in the semiconductor industry too lily-livered to make the big decisions?
Continue reading "Are modern semiconductor managers lily-livered?" »
Engineers around the world can experience the same nostalgic thrill as J.R.Hartley, the author, according to the TV ad, of 'Fly-Fishing'.
Continue reading "J.R.Hartley, Fly-Fishing and Old Designs." »
Before China gets too excited by Intel's decision to build a fab to make chip-sets in China, it ought to have a word with the Scots.
The Infineon deal in India to help set up 'Fab City' seems a much smarter deal all round than the Intel-China deal to set up a PC chip-set fab in China.
Continue reading "Infineon-India A Smarter Deal Than Intel-China" »
An age-old argument in the industry is: Is it affordable? Can anyone carry on paying for the horrendous costs of fabs?
It seems that Infineon has solved a number of challenges with its deal in India. Challenge No.1: How to get fab after its current fab stable obsoletes? Challenge No, 2: How to get into new markets? Challenge No.3: How to expand its manufacturing capability?
Just how much power is the foundry industry going to have? Intel says it will ship its first 45nm production microprocessors in the second half of this year. TSMC is saying it will run commercial 45nm wafers in September with volume production in the first half of next year.
Continue reading "How Powerful Are The Foundries Going To Get?" »
Every new process node has recently been characterised by a flurry of conflicting claims from Intel and TSMC about who is going to be first.
If the adage is right that there's 'No such thing as fab-lite, you either have a fab or you're fabless' then it looks as if STMicro took another step forward this week to going fabless.
What are IDMs for? With every skill-set in the industry being practised by specialist companies with a competence as good as an IDM, how will IDMs maintain their competitiveness?
How far does the semiconductor industry have to fear the foundries? At several industry conferences this year, the topic of conversation has come round to this.
Continue reading "Don't Be Afraid Of The Foundries, says TSMC" »
So how's Lenovo doing two years on from its purchase of IBM's PC division? Contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy that everything China touches turns to gold, it seems that Lenovo is struggling to find growth and profit just like everyone else in the PC business.
Rahul Sud, former Inmos chip designer, and the founding president of Lattice Semiconductor, now General Partner at venture capitalists Silicon Capital, has come up with a new industry business model.
Does it matter if the cost of running fabs is more in Europe than Asia? It obviously would matter if fab is to be the major value-add of the chip business but, like production operations in many other industries, it’s R&D and design which increasingly make up the value-add.
Continue reading "Does It Matter If All The Fabs Go To Asia?" »
Even in a poor capex spending year, and a particularly bad year for memory so far, SEMI, the equipment trade body, is reporting strong investment in manufacturing capacity by two sectors of the industry: memory companies and foundries.
The agreement by Qimonda to transfer its 70nm DRAM process technology to SMIC, with 65nm possibly to follow, is the second such deal this year in which a memory manufacturer transfers a leading edge process to a foundry. The first was Spansion agreeing to develop a 40nm flash process with TSMC.
Every now then it’s good to be gob-smacked, and one of the great things which EDA leader Synopsys brings to the semiconductor industry, besides its peerless design tools of course, is a tracking analysis for the new technologies, which frequently comes up with some gob-smacking statistics.
Fabs have been getting bigger for a while, but to build, and equip, an 80,000 300mm wafer a month fab, as Toshiba and SanDisk have just done, is truly awesome, especially when it’s dedicated to one product: NAND flash.
Are all those figures showing China’s huge trade surplus real? A new US study reveals that, when a $300 Apple iPod is exported from China, where final assembly is carried out, the value is recorded in China’s export statistics as $144, but the actual value added in China is only $4.
If there is to be more consolidation in the Japanese semiconductor industry, and it looks as if there will be, then Toshiba would appear to be the most lkely consolidator.
Gordon Moore always used to say he had never been able to see more than two process generations ahead, and this still seems apply, according to Toshiba Semiconductor's CEO, Shozo Saito.
Continue reading "The Sticking Point by Toshiba CEO Shozo Saito" »
The Japanese are going bananas on solar cells. Sanyo, Kyocera and Sharp are all ramping up production dramatically.
Japan’s electronics industry is going through the same sort of process as the UK’s did a decade or two ago.
It’s been a kind of Greek or Shakespearian tragedy. The North Tyneside wafer fab was cursed before birth, and everything went wrong for it thereafter. An unwanted baby, it became an unwanted child, and the announcement today of its dismemberment and sale completes the sorry saga.
Synplicity’s Synplify DSP tool, which uses Electronic System Level Design (ESL) models for DSP synthesis, is achieving some considerable success, it seems.
Continue reading "Success For Synplicity's ESL-based DSP Tool " »
Spaghetti or Asparagus? NXP reckons we’re moving from spaghetti-like electronics systems design to asparagus-like systems design.
Continue reading "Less Spaghetti; More Asparagus, Says NXP CTO" »
Gestating technology can be a very long process, and it’s interesting to see today’s announcement that Matsushita is putting the reconfigurable IC technology it acquired when it bought Elixent last year into a camcorder. It is the first commercial use of the technology.
Continue reading "Long Gestation For Elixent Reconfigurable Technology" »
One of the highlights of the Silicon Cycle is the regular tussle about who is first to the next process technology node. The usual suspects, TSMC, IBM and Intel, have been squaring up to eachother. This time with a nice extra twist.
Only in the semiconductor industry is it thought newsworthy if companies cut back on capital spending in order to match supply with demand.
Toshiba's announcement today that it is joining the IBM camp for its core CMOS technology puts the seal on a year in which NXP, TI, Infineon, STMicro and Freescale have all given up basic CMOS process development. Infineon, ST and Freescale are already in the IBM collaboration
Fujitsu’s decision to spin off its semiconductor became inevitable as its options for future technology development and manufacturing capability started to close.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing of course, but, for a couple of quarters now, the boss of STMicroelectronics, Carlo Bozotti, has been blaming ST’s poor financial results on the weak dollar.
Thanks to WTC for this one. The top ten MEMS manufacturers, judged by revenues are:
Double patterning looks like being the lithography tool of choice at 32nm, but how do you absorb the inevitable extra costs of a double lithography process?
Continue reading "Double Patterning OK But What About Its Cost?" »
Nine 300mm volume fabs will begin operation in 2008, and twelve new volume fabs are expected to start construction this year, according to SEMI the equipment manufacturers’ trade body.
Continue reading "Nine New High Volume Fabs Ramping This Year" »
The resignation of Toshihiko Ono from Fujitsu is quite amazing. Ono is a really good bloke who made a great job of running Fujitsu's semiconductor division, or Electronic Devices Group as they call it, then left to take up a corporate job planning product strategy for Fujitsu’s systems products.
Another week, another semiconductor joint venture. This week we’ve had MeiYa Technology, the new DRAM joint venture between Micron and Nanya. Last week we had the NXP-STMicroelectronics wireless joint venture. Another half a dozen DRAM companies are talking about joint ventures. Why are JVs so popular?
It’s funny to see Intel, TSMC and Samsung saying they want 450mm wafer manufacturing. Wouldn’t any device manufacturer? The question is: Will Samsung, Intel and TSMC pay for it?
Something pretty amazing seems to be happening in the semiconductor equipment industry, it's no longer dependent on selling equipment for manufacturing semiconductors, and appears to be getting less so.
Continue reading "Who's Going To Develop IC Manufacturing Equipment?" »