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The Japanese semiconductor industry has not learnt an important lesson - when in a hole stop digging.

Huge 2012 capex budgets at Intel, Samsung and TMC will skew the industry to make it extremely challenging, and in some cases impossible, for smaller companies to remain competitive, says IC Insights.

So, even the Americans are beginning to see the dangers of fab-lite strategies. The author of the Innovators Dilemma, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, says that going to foundries is an exporting of brains.

As always, process technology leadership is under debate. Is Intel way

ahead? Some think so.

With its acquisition of National, TI has now got 17% of an analogue market valued at $42 billion, Heinz-Peter Beckemeyer, EMEA director for analogue marketing, told a meeting in London yesterday.

So Cortex A15 is here and it will double the performance of  the A9. Samsung is sampling a dual core A15 running at 2GHz on a 32nm process and plans volume production in Q2 2012.

Has the penny finally dropped in Abu Dhabi that their move into the silicon foundry industry has been poorly executed?

After reports since the summer that GloFo was struggling to achieve yield from its 28nm line at Dresden, it is now reported that AMD has decided to give up on GloFo and go to TSMC for 28nm.

The race is to the highest volume producer, with the lowest costs, and the most advanced technology - just as it always was, says Andrea Cuomo, Senior Vice President at STMicroelectronics.

Scaling is no longer delivering sufficient cost reduction and there's not much hope of getting back to traditional Moore's Law cost decreases purely by process technology advances, says Joe Sawicki, Vice President and General Manager of the design to silicon division at Mentor Graphics.

Some nodes are good and some are bad. 0.13 micron was one of the worst nodes in history. 0.8 micron eluded everyone except Toshiba for a long time. 90nm and 65nm were good, but 40nm was bad. There's a feeling abroad that 28nm is going to be a good node.

Leading-edge wafer fab capacity is not going to become a commodity item, say analysts Future Horizons. Instead, supply will be limited and longer term supply commitments are the new name of the game. The era of ever-cheaper, freely available wafers is over, at least at the leading edge.

The race is on to get to Zero X, says Freescale's Jean-Christophe Bodet.

Using MEMS to shrink airborne guidance systems is opening up significant opportunities.

A Canadian company has printed a car. Urbee, the world's first printed car, was built on a 3D printer.

450mm is the most divisive issue ever to hit the semiconductor industry. For many years there was a stand-off between the device manufacturers and the equipment manufacturers about whether it was necessary.