Finance

The collapse in demand for smartphones has caused a severe drop in foundry orders for mobile SoCs. TSMC saw sales drop from $2.48 billion in July to $2.06 billion in August – a fall of over 17%. At UMC August sales were down 4% and the company said its Q3 wafer shipments may fall sequentially by as much as 5%, ...

The Taiwanese chip industry is in a state of accelerated consolidation with MediaTek acting as the consolidator. The independent Taiwan design community is now under notice that it will have to cope with a powerful competitor or a new owner. MediaTek already has a number of local chip companies under its belt, the most notable being MStar which was acquired ...

Intersil has bought Arizona mosfet specialist Great Wall Semiconductor (GWS) for $19 million. A further $4 million is payable if performance metrics are met. GWS was founded in 2002, has 10 employees and 22 patents related to lateral low-voltage power mosfet technology which allows low-gate charge power mosfets to be made on a CMOS process. ‘GWS’s design team brings valuable ...

Front end fab equipment spending (including new, used, and in-house) is projected to increase 5.0% in 2015 (to $37 billion) and another 6.6% in 2016 ($39.4 billion) according to SEMI. SEMI data indicates that some companies still plan to increase equipment spending in the second half of 2015, compared to the first half. Foundry is expected to slow in 2015 ...

The overall power semiconductor market, including both power discretes and power modules, is predicted to grow 5% in 2015 to reach $17 billion, says IHS. In 2014, y-o-y power discrete revenue grew 5% and power module revenue grew 12%. The global power module market is projected to comprise nearly one third (30 percent) of the power semiconductor market by 2019, ...

Quantenna is sampling 10G Wave 3 Wi-Fi products built on Quantenna’s True 8×8 QSR10G Wi-Fi platform with multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) technology for home wireless access points and residential gateways. Quantenna’s up-to-12-streams 10G Wave 3 can address both the service provider and retail market segments. 10G Wave 3 WiFi supports speeds up to 10Gbps attained by combining True 8×8 MIMO configuration ...

Asia-Pac will account for 58.9% of a chip market worth $295 billion this year, says IC Insights. IC Insights expects 2015 sales to split: US $68 billion, Europe $32 billion, Japan $23 billion, and ASia/Pac $174 billion for a total market of $395 billion. Asia-Pac is particularly dominant in computer and comms which will account for 74% of semi sales ...

July semiconductor sales of $28 billion were flat with June, reports the SIA. The regional split was: US $5.5 billion, Japan $2.6 billion, China $8.1 billion, Asia-Pac/All Other $8.9 billion, Europe $2.8 billion. While US sales were flat, China sales were up 6% m-o-m. “Global semiconductor sales have slowed somewhat this summer in part due to softening demand, normal market ...

Antenna specialist Antenova has designed antennas for On Board Devices (OBD) and vehicle telematics. The OBD design uses three new antennas inside an OBD housing to link to a satellite (GNSS), Bluetooth and a terrestrial network, whilst obtaining optimum performance from all three antennas simultaneously. The design also features a GNSS RF module to fix location. Antenova has used the ...

Discretes specialist Diodes of Texas is to buy Milton Keynes analogue and mixed signal company Pericom Semiconductor. The price is said to be ‘about $400m’, including the company’s cash. The combined companies will have revenues of $1bn plus. The price is about 40% more than the company’s market cap before the bid was made. “The proposed acquisition of Pericom accelerates the ...