China Factors Heavily In Policy And Business Considerations


The year begins with intensified attention to China’s rapid semiconductor industry growth, which was a central theme of the recent SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS) and also weighed heavily in a new report from a Presidential advisory council. Speaking at the SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS), Handel Jones, CEO of International Business Strategies (IBS), forecast the global sem... » read more

China Unveils Memory Plans


Backed by billions of dollars in government funding, China in 2014 launched a major initiative to advance its domestic semiconductor, IC-packaging and other electronic sectors. So far, though, the results are mixed. China is making progress in IC-packaging, but the nation’s efforts to advance its domestic logic and memory sectors are still a work in progress. In fact, China has yet to achi... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers IC Insights has released its rankings of the top 10 pure-play foundries in 2016. TSMC was the largest foundry in terms of sales, followed by GlobalFoundries, UMC, and SMIC, according to IC Insights. TSMC held a 59% share in 2016. According to IC Insights, the three top-10 pure-play foundry companies that displayed the highest growth rates in 2016 were X-Fab (54%), SMIC (31%) and To... » read more

Smart Manufacturing Gains Momentum


Smart manufacturing is gaining traction as a way of addressing increased market fragmentation while still leveraging economies of scale. The goal is to add a level of flexibility into manufacturing processes that until recently was considered impossible. Although the approach makes sense in theory, real-world implementation is proving far from consistent. Sometimes referred to as Industr... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers TDK has agreed to acquire MEMS supplier InvenSense for cash at an acquisition price of $13.00 per share, for a total acquisition price of $1.3 billion. Cypress has begun volume shipments of microcontrollers (MCUs) based on its 40nm Embedded Charge-Trap (eCT) flash technology. The MCUs are made on a foundry basis at UMC. UMC’s technology is a 40nm low power (40LP) logic process.... » read more

U.S. Tax Reform


By Jamie Gerard Although SEMI has been working on behalf of its members on reforming the U.S. business tax code for many years, the opportunity to see that change is becoming more likely than any time in the 21st century. President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress have signaled that tax reform will be at the top of their agenda as the 115th congres... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Samsung is mulling over a plan to reorganize its System LSI division, according to a report from BusinessKorea. As part of the move, Samsung is mulling over the idea to spin off its foundry unit, according to the report. A spokeswoman for Samsung’s foundry unit said: “We don't have any comments on this story.” GlobalFoundries has added eight new partners to its FDXcelera... » read more

Fab Tool Biz Faces Challenges In 2017


After experiencing a gradual recovery and positive growth in 2016, the semiconductor equipment industry sees a mixed picture as well as some uncertainty in 2017. In the near term, though, business is robust. Several chipmakers started to place a sizeable number of fab tool orders in the latter part of 2016, particularly in three areas—3D NAND, logic and foundry. Now, after buying the in... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers At this week’s IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco, TSMC as well as the team of GlobalFoundries, IBM and Samsung separately presented papers on 7nm finFET technology. Qualcomm has begun sampling the world’s first 10nm server processor. As the first in the Qualcomm Centriq product family, the ARM-based processor has up to 48-cores and is built ... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Manufacturing There are more changes at SEMI. SEMI has named David Anderson as president of the SEMI Americas region. Most recently, Anderson was chief executive and chairman of Novati, a specialty manufacturing fab. He replaces Karen Savala, who was president of the SEMI Americas region for six years. In an e-mail, Savala confirmed she left SEMI in October. Meanwhile, in October, SEMI an... » read more

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