Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Trade wars In recent testimony before a U.S. government panel considering tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods, SEMI called for the removal of about 30 tariff lines. These items are central to the semiconductor manufacturing process. “SEMI asserts that these tariffs will harm not only companies operating in the U.S., but other companies as well in the semiconductor supply chain... » read more

Falling Chip Forecasts


It’s time to take a pulse of the semiconductor market amid the memory downturn and trade frictions with China. For some time, the DRAM and NAND markets have been hit hard with falling prices and oversupply. Then, the Trump administration last year slapped tariffs on Chinese goods. China retaliated. And the trade war rages on between the U.S. and China. More recently, the U.S. Department... » read more

Playing Into China’s Hands


The fallout over blacklisting Huawei in particular, and China in general, has set the tone for a nasty global race. But it is almost certain to produce a different result than the proponents of a trade war are expecting. The idea behind tariffs and the blacklisting of Huawei is to starve China of vital technology. So far, the impact has been minimal. Reports from inside of China are equa... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Packaging and test In the rankings, ASE was the top OSAT in terms of sales in the first quarter of 2019, according to TrendForce. Amkor and JCET were next in the rankings. “Judging from the falling phone sales 1Q19 impacted by the U.S.-China trade dispute and the oversupply situation in memory markets, the total revenue of the top ten businesses in packaging and testing are predicted to st... » read more

The Arm-Huawei Disconnect


Arm's move to stop licensing its processor IP to HiSilicon, the captive chipmaker for Huawei, has set off a panic across the semiconductor industry. While the underlying threat to the entire chip industry is very real, many of the conclusions being drawn about this move are misleading or just plain wrong. When the U.S. government blacklisted Huawei, it imposed export restrictions on shipping... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Market research In terms of overall IC sales, Intel has replaced Samsung as the number one quarterly semiconductor supplier in 4Q18 after losing the lead spot to Samsung in 2Q17, according to IC Insights. “While Samsung held the full-year number one ranking in 2017 and 2018, Intel is forecast to easily recapture the number one ranking for the full-year of 2019, a position it previously held ... » 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

5G Heats Up Base Stations


Before 5G can be deployed commercially on a large scale, engineers have to solve some stubborn problems—including how to make a hot technology a whole lot cooler. 5G-capable modem chipsets are already on the market from Qualcomm, Samsung, Huawei, MediaTek, Intel and Apple, with some 5G service (LTE-Advanced/LTE-Advanced Pro) available in the U.S. But still mostly missing from the 5G equati... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers and OEMs Diamond semiconductor IP vendor AKHAN Semiconductor is cooperating with a U.S. federal investigation into alleged theft of its intellectual property by China’s Huawei. When AKHAN agreed to send its proprietary technology to Huawei pursuant to an agreement, AKHAN “believes that Huawei destroyed our product, shipped it to China without authorization, subjected it to tests... » read more

Will AI Drive Scaling Forward?


The almost ubiquitous rollout of AI and its offshoots—machine learning, deep learning, neural nets of all types—will require significantly more processing power as the amount of data that needs to be processed continues to grow by orders of magnitude. What isn't clear yet is how that will affect semiconductor manufacturing or how quickly that might happen. AI is more than the latest buz... » read more

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