EDA Shows Continued Growth


EDA and IP revenue jumped 3.8% in Q2 to $1.65 billion, up from $1.59 billion in the same period in 2013, spurred by the need for new tools to design, create and verify SoCs using 16/14nm finFETs. Sequentially, the numbers reported by the EDA Consortium were down slightly from Q1, but the four-quarter moving average—considered a more reliable number because tools sales are long-term investm... » read more

Dissecting The Numbers


In the annals of semiconductor history, July is typically the worst month of the year in terms of sequential monthly change. Going back to 1997, semiconductor sales in July are usually down 10% to over 30%. The chart below shows a pictorial representation of the monthly percent change in July over June for the last 16 years. We’re not implying that everyone should break out the party hats,... » read more

A Different Kind Of Bottleneck


Electronics have always lived in troubling times. There have been threats of outsourcing, not to mention re-outsourcing from the outsourcers, constant pressure from startups from around the globe, pricing pressures, government intervention, technological issues, and rising complexity that is now forcing a complete re-thinking of the supply chain. More recently, the demand has been for mobility,... » read more

The Week In Review: Aug. 23


By Ed Sperling Cadence won a deal with Realtek, which licensed the Tensilica HiFi audio DSP core for voice recognition technology. Fast voice triggers have been possible for some time, but being able to combine that with low power for mobile devices isn’t easy because the devices are always on—or at least enough “on” to pick up voice commands. Mentor Graphics turned in a record-bre... » read more

The New ASIC


By Javier DeLaCruz The current state of the art For years, large ASICs like the ones used in network processing, supercomputing and high-end personal computing have had very interesting similarities. The figure below is a fairly typical floorplan of such an ASIC. After taping out over a dozen of these types of chips a year, it is interesting to see that the interfaces have changed, processo... » read more

Foundries Eye 300mm Analog Fabs


By Mark LaPedus In 2009, Texas Instruments changed the semiconductor landscape when it opened the industry’s first 300mm fab for analog chips. Until then, analog chip production was conducted in fabs at 200mm wafer sizes and below. With a 300mm fab, TI potentially could gain a die-size and cost advantage over its analog rivals. On paper, a 300mm wafer provides 2.5 times more chips than a... » read more

The Week In Review: June 21


By Ed Sperling Mentor Graphics rolled out emulation-ready verification IP for MIPI camera and display-based protocols. The VIP enables stimuli generated by UVM and SystemC-based environments and applies them to a design under test (DUT) running in the emulator. Synopsys introduced a tool for implementing and verifying functional engineering change orders, including matching, visualization ... » read more

Fab Equipment Spending To Rise


By Christian Gregor Dieseldorff Fab equipment spending will grow two percent year-over-year (US$ 32.5 billion) for 2013 and 23 to 27 percent in 2014 ($41 billion) according to the May edition of the SEMI World Fab Forecast. Fab construction spending, which can be a strong indicator for future equipment spending, is expected to grow 6.5 percent ($6.6 billion) in 2013, followed by a decline of 1... » read more

Painting By Numbers


By Joanne Itow Semiconductor revenue growth dropped to a compound annual growth rate of only 3.4% over the past five years and units grew only 3.0%. Throughout the same period, semiconductor wafer demand grew 6.6%, higher than unit growth but lower than the historical average. What caused this decline and will the industry ever get back to ‘normal’ growth rates? Figure 1. Annual Growth ... » read more

Upbeat Prediction


By Clark Tseng The semiconductor industry started out quite strong in 2012 but declined rapidly in the second half of the year, resulting in a slight year-over-year decline of 2.7% in worldwide semiconductor sales. On the other hand, worldwide capital equipment market recorded a decline of 15% from $43.5 billion in 2011 to $36.9 billion in 2012 according to the SEMI WWSEMS report. While indust... » read more

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