The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Fab tools and test Four former employees at Applied Materials were charged by the U.S. for allegedly trying to steal the company’s own fab tool technology designs, according to a report from Bloomberg and others. The former employees were allegedly trying to sell the technology to a Chinese startup that would compete against Applied, according to the report. The former employees--Liang C... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Commentary Chris Voce of Forrester Research writes that the Internet of Things next year will move beyond experimentation in this piece. “At Forrester we believe IoT extends beyond devices and connectivity,” he writes. “But it's the business impact of IoT that truly defines what it is: the insights that you can derive with analytics and the business outcomes you can achieve.” M&A M... » read more

Week In Review: Design


Acquisitions Marvell signed a definitive agreement to buy Cavium for roughly $6 billion. The deal is expected to close in mid-2018. The Cavium deal fits squarely on the cloud side and gives Marvell a much bigger reach into enterprise networking and infrastructure, as well as some developing markets. Siemens paid an undisclosed price to buy Solido Design Automation, which tracks variation i... » read more

Deals: Mentor-Solido, Marvell-Cavium


Marvell today signed a definitive agreement to buy Cavium for roughly $6 billion, ending weeks of speculation about whether the deal would go through. And Mentor, a Siemens business, paid an undisclosed price to buy Solido Design Automation, which tracks variation in complex designs. Both deals are part of a new flurry of M&A activity across the semiconductor industry as the industry ret... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Market research For some time, DRAM shortages have plagued the market. Today, the situation remains the same. DRAMs are seeing strong demand. But yet, vendors are not adding any capacity. “Strained DRAM supply was even more evident during the third quarter as limited production capacity and limited technological progress for the memory industry encountered robust demand from data centers in ... » read more

Automotive Foundries


The race to win a piece of the automotive electronics business has now reached the foundry level, and right now it's not clear exactly how this is going to work. This is uncharted territory for everyone. The build-out of electronics for assisted and autonomous driving is brand new. For existing cars, most of the chips being used are off-the-shelf microcontrollers, commodity MEMS sensors, and... » read more

Five Trends In IC Packaging


At one time, chip packaging was an afterthought. Chipmakers were more worried about IC design. Packaging was considered a mere commodity, which was simply used to house the design. More recently, though, chip packaging has become a hot topic. The IC design is still important, but packaging is a key part of the solution. In fact, the industry can go down two paths. The traditional way is t... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Packaging and test A*STAR’s Institute of Microelectronics (IME) has formed a fan-out wafer-level packaging consortium comprising of OSATs, materials vendors, equipment suppliers and others. The group is called the FOWLP Development Line Consortium. As part of the announcement, Singapore’s IME has established a development line to accelerate the development of fan-out. Located in IME’s... » read more

The Week in Review: IoT


Security Mocana said it is working with Avnet, Infineon Technologies, Microsoft, and Xilinx to provide Industrial Internet of Things systems that meet cybersecurity standards. The systems utilize the Avnet UltraZed-EG system-on-module, Mocana’s security software running on the Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+ MPSoc, and Infineon’s OPTIGA Trusted Platform Module 2.0 security chip. The Microsoft Azur... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Bloomberg has reported that Broadcom is in talks to acquire Qualcomm for $70 per share or about $90 billion. Qualcomm is attempting to acquire NXP, but Broadcom has its sights on Qualcomm, not NXP. “We think AVGO would want to acquire QCOM assets not NXP,” said Amit Daryanani, an analyst with RBC. Samsung continues to reshuffle its management amid a plethora of changes at t... » read more

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