tag: business

Foundries Face Challenges in 2016
By Mark LaPedus - 17 Dec, 2015 - Comments: 2

Generally, 2015 has been a challenging year in the foundry business. For one thing, the foundry industry will register modest growth in 2015. In addition, the foundry customer base is consolidating. And on the leading edge, foundries took longer than expected to ramp up their 16nm/14nm finFET processes. So, after an eventful year in 2015, what’s in store for the foundry business in 2016? I... » read more

The Human Bottleneck
By Ed Sperling - 10 Dec, 2015 - Comments: 0

The history of semiconductor technology can be neatly summed up as a race to eliminate the next bottleneck. This is often done one process node at a time across an increasingly complex ecosystem. And it usually involves a high level of frustration, because the biggest problems stem from areas where engineering teams generally can't do anything about them. Concerns over the years have ranged ... » read more

Reflections On 2015
By Brian Bailey - 10 Dec, 2015 - Comments: 0

It is easy to make predictions, but few people can make them with any degree of accuracy. Most of the time, those predictions are forgotten by the end of the year and there is no one to do a tally of who holds more credibility for next year. Not so with Semiconductor Engineering. We like to hold people's feet to the fire, but while the "Pants-On-Fire" meter may be applicable to politicians, we ... » read more

Innovation Matters
By Zining Wu - 09 Dec, 2015 - Comments: 0

Innovation is not something that just happens. It requires a culture that rewards innovation, and the only way to make that happen is with buy-in at every level. What's needed is a climate for building, inventing and designing ICs and systems that push technology boundaries and help move the industry forward. This is a key ingredient for innovation that has been used across the globe to brin... » read more

Laws Don’t Apply Anymore
By Ed Sperling - 03 Dec, 2015 - Comments: 0

One of the nifty things about technology is that it's always new and always being refreshed. That creates problems, though. The speed with which technology is overhauled or changed out is so much faster than the social and legal infrastructure built to support and protect the people buying it, that the two worlds are now years, if not decades, out of sync. The first whiff of this came in 198... » read more

Low-Power Considerations For IoT Devices
By Charlie Cheng - 03 Dec, 2015 - Comments: 0

The concept of the Internet of Things has produced plenty of fanciful thinking about what’s possible. There are some wonderfully creative idea, not all of them practical. That's too bad, because there are ample areas that could benefit from functional IoT devices, such as: • Infrastructure sensors for buildings and bridges; • Medical sensors for use on or inside the body; • Oil drill... » read more

Consolidation’s Aftermath
By Ed Sperling - 02 Dec, 2015 - Comments: 4

The recent spate of industry consolidation continues to have repercussions across the semiconductor industry. Some of those effects will subside once the deals are either approved or nixed by regulatory agencies. Others will raise questions for months or years to come. Consolidation is not a new trend in the semiconductor industry, but the pace and size of the acquisitions in the past year a... » read more

Healthy Growth Predictions For MEMS
By Paula Doe - 30 Nov, 2015 - Comments: 0

To figure out what’s actually happening in the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) market, there’s no better place to look than MEMS and sensors, which are enabling this revolution in embedded intelligence in ever more places. The MEMS market is seeing continued steady growth, but components suppliers also are seeing brutal price declines and low margins, while the data analysis side captures... » read more

The Challenge Of Fitting In
By Ann Mutschler - 30 Nov, 2015 - Comments: 0

Connections between players in the semiconductor industry are becoming critical for survival. Whether the focus is a connected car, home automation, health care or the energy grid, each company in each of those markets relies on others to build useful products. There are several forces at work here. One is an emphasis on connecting everything, regardless of whether it is inside a single vert... » read more

The Pain Of Change
By Ed Sperling - 24 Nov, 2015 - Comments: 0

If the still evolving shift left has taught the semiconductor industry anything, it's that nothing can be counted on to stay the same for very long. The basic proposition of doing more earlier in the design cycle to speed up time to market—and thereby shifting everything left in the linear flow—means that every silo that has been constructed over the past several decades needs to be rethoug... » read more

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