Semico is a semiconductor marketing & consulting research company located in Phoenix, Arizona. We offer custom consulting, portfolio packages, individual market research studies and premier industry conferences.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is anticipated to be the next big market driver that will create new or additional semiconductor demand for a wide spectrum of semiconductor devices. We believe that AI will be integrated in devices from the cloud to factories, homes, offices and vehicles. The application must accommodate mobile and IoT products. The second publication in Semico’s series of AI-related reports and presentations, this report addresses two large markets for AI: the smart home and the automotive markets. Fifteen smart home end-point devices, as well as 15 automotive systems are
published by Rich Wawrzyniak on Fri, 2019-03-15 21:56
This week, Facebook announced it had acquired Sonics, Inc., a 3rd Party Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) vendor. Sonics is one of the mainstays of the SIP market for Interconnect SIP, which is used to tie together the multiple tens or hundreds of SIP blocks found on contemporary System-on-a-Chip (SoC) silicon solutions today. Sonics was founded in 1996 and was at the heart of the emerging SoC market in its early years along with ARC, ARM, MIPS, Analog Bits, Virage Logic and many others.
It is no surprise that a company like Facebook, who is designing their own AI-focused SoCs, would purchase a company like Sonics. While no details of this acquisition have been released, some reasoned insights are possible.
Implications for the Market
This acquisition removes a major player for Interconnect SIP from the market. Sonics’ customers must now determine how long Sonics will support them and at what level. It is reasonable to expect these customers will look to other suppliers for their interconnect requirements.
The semiconductor industry has become adept at taking an already existing entity and breathing new life into it through innovation and new technologies - and recasting it into something much more vital and interesting. The System-on-a-Chip (SoC) market has become larger than the sum of its parts by helping to create whole new markets and applications. In this sense, the SoC has helped turn ideas into a marketable form by facilitating the marriage of functions and features once considered impossible to manufacture on a single monolithic die.
2018 was a good year for the semiconductor industry as manufacturers began rolling out new products targeted at artificial intelligence applications requiring both the most advanced technologies for AI training functions as well as potentially high-volume manufacturing capabilities for edge devices.
The Wafer Demand Summary and Assumptions is a quarterly publication. It includes an excel spreadsheet with annual wafer demand by product by technology from 2010-2022. Product categories include DRAM, SRAM, NAND, NOR, Other Non-volatile, MPU, MCU, DSP, Computing MOS Logic, Communications MOS Logic, Consumer MOS Logic, Automotive MOS Logic, Other MOS Logic, Programmable Logic, Standard Cell, Gate Array, Analog, Discrete, Optoelectronics, Sensors and Digital Bipolar.
The World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organization held its bi-annual forecast meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona last month, and one of the topics that seemed to be on everyone’s mind is the impact of tariffs and the trade tensions between the United States and China. The presentation with the most insightful information on this topic was provided by Falan Yinug, Director, Industry Statistics and Economic Policy, at the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).
The need to impose tariffs on U.S. imports of semiconductors is perplexing because as of 2017 the United States maintained a semiconductor trade surplus of $2.1 billion with China. In addition, most of the U.S. imports of semiconductors from China are products from U.S. semiconductor companies that are either designed and/or have undergone front-end fabrication outside of China.
With the artificial intelligence trend emerging, the semiconductor market has gone from lamenting the lack of innovation and new applications to seeing an explosion of new possibilities opening before it. The short and long term impacts on SoC architectures, on the SIP market, on the software market, on design starts, on the EDA market, on market revenues and on unit volumes are going to be profound.
With the artificial intelligence trend emerging, the semiconductor market has gone from lamenting the lack of innovation and new applications to seeing an explosion of new possibilities opening before it.
published by Morry Marshall on Wed, 2018-10-31 00:05
Many IoT (Internet of Things) applications will be untethered, not connected by physical wires for power or communications. They will use batteries, and battery life will be critical. Atmosic Technologies, a Bay Area startup of ultra-low power wireless for the IoT, has developed a chip ideally suited for these applications.
This week, Atmosic Technologies launched the M2 and M3 series, touting it as the industry’s lowest-power wireless Bluetooth 5.0 chips. It offers improved battery life in three ways. First, the chip was designed from the ground up to be a low-power chip. It has intrinsic design features that offer five to 10 times more battery life than other Bluetooth 5.0 chips. Second, it has on-demand receiving. The chip can be in a sleep mode until it receives a Bluetooth signal including specific codes to wake it up. That feature can improve battery life by up to 100 times. Third, it includes an RF Power Harvesting Section. By harvesting RF energy, the chip offers what can be essentially infinite battery life. The chip can use any of these three methods of battery life improvement on its own or in any combination.
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Forward Visibility for Semiconductor Pricing and Availability
Production lines need assured supplies at predictable prices, but the semiconductor industry is a cyclical business.Semiconductor prices and availability swing rapidly in response to changes in supply and demand.
