Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Market research After years of falling demand, the PC market is back. The second quarter of 2020 ended well for the traditional PC market, including desktops, notebooks, and workstations. Global PC shipments jumped 11.2% year-over-year reaching a total of 72.3 million units, according to IDC. As restrictions around the world tightened in the first few weeks of the quarter, demand for notebo... » read more

Blog Review: March 18


Arm's Divya Prasad investigates whether power rails that are buried below the BEOL metal stack and back-side power delivery can help alleviate some of the major physical design challenges facing 3nm nodes and beyond. Rambus' Steven Woo takes a look at a Roofline model for analyzing machine learning applications that illustrates how AI applications perform on Google’s tensor processing unit... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers A fire broke out this week at a joint NAND flash fab between Western Digital (WD) and Kioxia. Kioxia is the former Toshiba NAND flash unit that was recently spun out by the Japanese company. “On Monday, January 6, (morning, January 7 local time) a small fire occurred at one of our joint venture facilities in Yokkaichi, Japan. Local firefighters quickly extinguished the fire, and w... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Fab tools The confidence level of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography continues to grow as the technology moves into production, but the EUV mask infrastructure remains a mixed picture, according to new surveys released by the eBeam Initiative. D2S has developed new hardware and software that enables a long-awaited technology--full-chip masks using inverse lithography technology (ILT). ... » read more

Outlook For Masks, Materials and Wafers


After a slowdown in the first half of 2019, chipmakers and equipment vendors face a cloudy outlook for the second half of this year, with a possible recovery in 2020. But what about other key technologies like materials, photomasks and silicon wafers? These are also critical for the semiconductor supply chain and are key indicators where the market is heading. In the first half of 2019, m... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers TSMC posted mixed results for the second quarter. It also presented a mixed outlook for the third quarter, according to various reports. TSMC and Samsung are in the midst of a foundry battle at 7nm and 5nm. “TSMC raised its 2019 capex outlook to over $11B, up from prior guidance of $10B-$11B. The increased capex is to support 5nm and 7nm ramps, with accelerated 5G investment a... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Trade More trade news: "The Trump administration is hiking duties on $200 billion worth of Chinese products to 25% from 10%," according to CNBC. The following is attributed to Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), in response to President Trump’s plan to increase tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports to 25%: “The president is seeking a bet... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Fab tools ASML said it has disagreed with any implication that it has been a victim of “Chinese espionage,” as stated in an article in a Dutch newspaper. The article discusses the results of a public court case in the United States that ASML won last year. In the case, XTAL was found by a jury to have misappropriated ASML’s confidential and proprietary information as well as trade secret... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Materials Wesfarmers, an Australian diversified firm, has made an unsolicited bid to acquire Lynas, one of the world’s largest suppliers of rare earths outside of China. Rare earths are chemical elements found in the Earth’s crust. They are used in cars, consumer electronics, computers, communications, clean energy and defense systems. The big market for rare earths is magnets. In semicond... » read more

Materials M&A Mania


The electronics materials business has seen a wave of mergers and acquisitions in recent times. Clearly, it’s important to keep tabs on this industry. Vendors in the electronics materials business are critical to the supply chain—they provide the key gases, materials and other products for various industries, such as display, MEMS, packaging, semiconductor and others. But it takes a s... » read more

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