UNH Ethernet testbed launches new consortium

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The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), an Ethernet testbed, has created a new consortium to help semiconductor businesses address the automotive industry’s requirement of in-vehicle networking.

The group has launched the Automotive Ethernet Consortium, a group that works with its member companies in the auto industry to test various methods that will promote automotive Ethernet devices, the IOL said Monday.

Need for the industry-supported consortium was created because of the integration of applications including advanced navigation and voice recognition, on-board diagnostics and other features in vehicles. As members of the consortium, semiconductor companies can test whether their chips meet the requirements of the BroadR-Reach standard, which allows multiple car systems to access and share information over a single pair, unsheilded cable.

The standard could potentially decrease the cost of connectivity by 80 percent, and the weight of cabling by up to 30 percent because, according to the UNH-IOL, the standard uses one pair of cables and can rely on the same connectors and cables used by other networking technologies in the car. Read More

California Gives Samsung Semiconductor Huge Incentives to Expand in San Jose

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California Governor Jerry Brown was in Silicon Valley on Thursday to help Samsung Semiconductor Inc. announce that it will expand its San Jose office. The working meeting was also attended by Samsung Electronics President Jong Joong Kim, San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed and the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, who were all there to witness the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Samsung, the city, and Santa Clara County.

The memorandum outlined an agreement in which the city, county and state will provide a number of incentives to Samsung to expand the company’s research and development facility here.  Those incentives are expected to include state research and development tax credits, employee training credits, expedited permitting processes, and fee reductions for traffic abatement and construction taxes. In addition, the company will receive a rebate of up to half of utility taxes for 10 years and receive a $500,000 economic development incentive. A full copy of the memorandum is available here.

“Samsung’s expansion in California is great news and it further strengthens the state’s role as a world leader in innovation,” said Governor Brown, in what is also his first trip to the San Jose City Hall since being elected governor in 2010. “Here’s a case where government and business work together – and everyone benefits.” Read More

Semiconductor Industry Will Stay In The Red For All Of 2012

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Forecasts by semiconductor companies for the next quarter have almost unanimously been lowered following Q2 earnings announcements.

  • Intel (INTC) lowered its Q3 guidance, citing “a more challenging macroeconomic environment.”
  • Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC), however, expects to see a future dip in the company’s earnings due to weakening economic conditions in the U.S., where job growth is weak, and in other countries including Europe, Japan and China, according to CEO Morris Chang.
  • Texas Instruments (TXN) cut its third-quarter outlook as customers pulled back on orders for its wireless products.
  • Qualcomm (QCOM) sees sales softening, lowering outlook, but is upbeat on year-end smartphone demand.

The semiconductor industry in 2012 through June is currently DOWN 5.4% over the same period in 2011 based on Semiconductor Industry Association’s (SIA) 3-month moving average, as shown in the chart below.

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IBM Spintronics Breakthrough Could Lead to New Magnetic-based Semiconductor Transistors

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IBM Research joins a European university team to synchronize electron spins, which could enable a new class of magnetic-based semiconductor transistors resulting in more energy efficient electronic devices.


IBM and scientists at ETH Zurich, a leading European university, have introduced the first-ever direct mapping of the formation of a persistent spin helix in a semiconductor, Big Blue said.

The goal of the project is to use electron spins for storing, transporting and processing information. However, up to this breakthrough, it was unclear whether or not electron spins possessed the capability to preserve the encoded information long enough before rotating.

Yet, as illustrated in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Physics, scientists from IBM Research and the Solid State Physics Laboratory at ETH Zurich demonstrated that synchronizing electrons extends the spin lifetime of the electron by 30 times to 1.1 nanoseconds — the same time it takes for an existing 1 GHz processor to cycle.

Today’s computing technology encodes and processes data by the electrical charge of electrons, IBM explained in a press release. However, this technique is limited as the semiconductor dimensions continue to shrink to the point where the flow of electrons can no longer be controlled. Spin electronics or spintronics could surmount this approaching impasse by harnessing the spin of electrons instead of their charge, IBM said.

This new understanding in spintronics not only gives scientists unprecedented control over the magnetic movements inside devices but also opens new possibilities for creating more energy efficient electronics. Read More

Advanced Micro Devices and Texas Instruments on the Upswing as Semiconductor Outlook Brightens

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The Semiconductor Industry rallied last week after recent reports provided a positive outlook for the industry. Stocks received a boost Tuesday after Goldman Sachs raised its rating from “neutral” to “attractive” for the group. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) surged over 2 percent Tuesday. Five Star Equities examines the outlook for companies in the Semiconductor Industry and provides equity research on Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) and Texas Instruments Inc. (TXN).

Access to the full company reports can be found at:

www.FiveStarEquities.com/AMD

www.FiveStarEquities.com/TXN

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) last Friday reported that worldwide chip sales total $24.4 billion for the month of June, a 2 percent decrease from the a year ago. On the positive side, the drop was the smallest year-over-year decrease since October 2011. International Data Corporation in an update of the Semiconductor Applications Forecaster (SAF) forecasts that worldwide semiconductor revenues will increase 4.6 percent in 2012 to $315 billion.

“The semiconductor industry continues to navigate the turbulent global economy better than most sectors,” SIA President Brian Toohey said. “But macroeconomic uncertainties are limiting overall recovery and growth.” Read More

Strategy Analytics: Automotive Semiconductor Growth in Uncertain Markets

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The Strategy Analytics Automotive Electronics Service (AES) report, “Automotive Semiconductor Demand Forecast 2010 – 2019”, predicts a surprising 11.5 percent growth in automotive semiconductor demand for 2012 – in view of more modest industry predictions for growth this year in the total global semiconductor market.

According to a release, the automotive industry megatrends of environment, safety, information and the need for affordable cars for emerging markets will continue to drive good growth opportunities for the automotive semiconductor market, despite the short term market uncertainties. With the global automotive semiconductor market worth $23.7 billion in 2011, these industry imperatives are expected to drive market revenue CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 9.3 percent over the five year period 2011 to 2016.

Semiconductor demand from vehicle production growth in North America, Japan, Thailand and the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), regions this year will more than compensate for the decline observed in Europe, resulting in revenues of $26.4 billion. Expanding adoption of electronically controlled features in both mature and emerging vehicle markets is contributing to the long term growth outlook. Read More

Taiwan Semiconductor Plans to Invest $1.4 Billion in ASML

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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (2330) agreed to invest 1.11 billion euros ($1.4 billion) in ASML Holding NV (ASML), joining Intel (INTC) (INTC) Corp. in taking a stake in Europe’s largest chip-equipment maker to secure future technology.

TSMC will acquire a 5 percent equity holding in Veldhoven, Netherlands-based ASML for 838 million euros and invest a further 276 million euros in research and development of next- generation lithography technologies, ASML said.

The purchase will give TSMC access to machines under development that will reduce manufacturing costs and that the Dutch company says may prompt consolidation in the industry. Intel, the world’s biggest chipmaker, agreed to invest as much as $4.1 billion last month in ASML’s so-called co-investment program to fund innovation.

The investment is “long-term positive for TSMC,” Patrick Liao and Jason Ho, technology analysts at Nomura Holdings Inc., said in a note today. The investment implies TSMC will have “joint intellectual property rights of the critical lithography research and development in the future.” Read More

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Physicists at The University of Texas at Austin, in collaboration with colleagues in Taiwan and China, have developed the world’s smallest semiconductor laser, a breakthrough for emerging photonic technology with applications from computing to medicine.

The scientists report their efforts in this week’s Science.

Miniaturization of semiconductor lasers is key for the development of faster, smaller and lower energy photon-based technologies, such as ultrafast computer chips; highly sensitive biosensors for detecting, treating and studying disease; and next-generation communication technologies.

Such photonic devices could use nanolasers to generate optical signals and transmit information, and have the potential to replace electronic circuits. But the size and performance of photonic devices have been restricted by what’s known as the three-dimensional optical diffraction limit.

“We have developed a nanolaser device that operates well below the 3-D diffraction limit,” said Chih-Kang “Ken” Shih, professor of physics at The University of Texas at Austin. “We believe our research could have a large impact on nanoscale technologies.” Read More

 

 

Engineers rule! (But you knew that.)

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by Debra Vogler, Instant Insight Inc., Sunnyvale, CA

In a column written before SEMICON West 2012, SEMICON West: Spectator or Participant? , I promised to share some data about the news and events surrounding the show culled from social media traffic. Tradeshow Media Partners – the folks who brought you the Show Dailies during West – measured the number of people, companies, and entities that engaged in immediate and extended content and conversations (related to the show) over a 10-day period of time. The results are in and – of course – engineers rule!

A total of 13.4 million social impressions (i.e., tweets, postings, conversations) across Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Facebook, were generated by a total of 11,230 global contributors. These global contributors broke down into the following categories: 41.2% were engineers, 21.9% were researchers and/or analysts, 18.5% were in marketing and sales; at the bottom were industry executives (6.1%) and designers (3.9%).

While it is expected that the greatest percentage of the 11,230 participants (27.3%) would come from the U.S., the rest of the participants in social media directly related to the show settled out as follows: 11.4% from South Korea, 11.1% from Taiwan, 9.8% from China, and 8.9% from the Netherlands. Other countries contributed percentages below 8%.

Of the more than 400 terms, product categories, and interest areas that were tracked, it might be somewhat surprising that materials was the highest trending topic (at 43.5%) with wafer processing coming in at 40.2%. All other categories were less than 40% (though test/devices almost made it at 39.8%). Within the topic of packaging (at 33.7%), the number one trending topic was 3D ICs with fine-pitch interconnects coming in second.   

I’m not a marketer and I don’t play one on TV, but if I had to guess, I’d say the enthusiasm with which engineers contributed to the discussion about SEMICON West on social media platforms is probably a reflection of the intense efforts currently occurring to develop the solutions needed for sub-22nm equipment and materials sets – whether for 3D ICs, new transistor architectures, or lithography. Someone has to choose all those new components, materials, and design elements to make sub-22nm processes and platforms a reality. So if someone says engineers aren’t social, don’t believe them!

 

 

 


Dialog Semiconductor Announces Its Results for the Second Quarter of 2012

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Company meets Q2 guidance, reporting a record second quarter revenue of $159.5 million, representing year-on-year growth of 37.4%


Dialog Semiconductor plc (DLG.F), a provider of highly integrated innovative power management, audio and low energy short range wireless technologies, today reports results for its second quarter ending 29 June 2012.

Q2 2012 Financial Highlights

  • Revenue for Q2 2012 was $159.5 million, an increase of 37.4% over Q2 2011
  • Incremental gross margin improvement of 0.6 percentage points in the quarter
  • Q2 2012 IFRS operating profit (EBIT) was $13.4 million or 8.4% of revenue with underlying(*) operating profit of $16.9 million or 10.6% of revenue
  • Q2 2012 underlying(*) EBITDA(**) of $24.4 million or 15.3% of revenue, compared to $20.4 million or 17.6% in the prior year
  • Q2 2012 underlying(*) diluted earnings per share of 20 cents, compared to 24 cents in Q2 2011
  • Remain confident in our ability to meet current market revenue expectations for the full year 2012

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