In terms of Market capital, these are the ranking of the major mobile phone companies.
Samsung 53B
Nokia 22.6B
HTC 25.4B
RIM 13.8B
Motorola 4.2B
LG 10B
Sony Ericsson 3B
If all these companies are added up together will be 132B.
How about the King? Apple market cap is 302B and having cash 70B in the bank.
So who will be the major player for Mobile phone business? Obviously will be Apple,
If Apple takes out his cash I the bank probably could buy up all the Mobile phone company except Samsung.
However the US anticompetition court will not allow Apple to do so.
Apple in 2010 bought 17.5B worth of semiconductor, a 79.6% increase from 9.7B in 2009. So Apple is the key influential player in the chip purchase. Second is HP and third is Samsung amongst 10 major OEM Semiconductor buyers.
HK Snob
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Semiconductor Equipment Business Forecast for 2H 2011
Japan Quake Aftermath effect The Japan earthquake and tsunami that took place on 11 March, has resulted in an overstock of chips at IDM and Fabless. A large stock of chips was built as a result slow demand in the second quarter. Such an excess of chip stock will result in poor sales in the third quarter. For the last five years the third quarter has shown to be an average high season for chip demand. The high unemployment figures in the USA does not show signs of improvement as financial confidence remains low in the market. An oversupply of chips and an uncertain future demand and chip ASP pressure has not helped in the in 2H 11.
The Aftermath of Japan Quake has resulted in production of Non-Japanese supplies of Sensors, Detectors for automobiles and power management devices for note books. Large world players such as Vishay, NXP, Allegro, and Infineon have benefitted from Japans tragedy.
SIA Research
Integrated circuits still remain the most dominant segment of the semiconductor industry, and account for around 84% of the total revenue in 2009 followed by optoelectronics, discrete components and sensors. SIA research projects that future growth will be driven by sensors followed by optoelectronics, discrete and ICs semiconductors with a projected CAGR at around 17%, 15%, 11% and 8% respectively for the period 2011-2013.
Tablet Smartphone’s and tablets including iPadII, have continued to gain popularity, with increased sales from 5% to 25%, as result of the desktop computer is losing its market share from 42% to 28% by 2014.
Troop Pullout
According to statistics, the war in Afghanistan is costing American taxpayers some $10 billion a month. In addition to 100,000 US troops, more than 40,000 NATO soldiers are also stationed in Afghanistan. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost the US $1 trillion over the past decade. Obama has told the US that the plans for troop withdrawal from Afghanistan (promised 18 months ago) will begin next month.
Unemployment Rate
Obama has promised to create 5 million jobs, although the investment value of government stimulus is debatable. It is clear from the current unemployment figures that Obama's Keynesian policies have failed to create any significant number of jobs, let alone sustainable green jobs. In fact, the Obama Administration seems to be taken by surprise, too at the lack of progress made in this area.
US Presidential Election
2012 is Obama presidential election year, and Obama will be trying to pursue the throne again. He will not consider softening his approach to boosting the economy and has presented a strong campaign based on what he promised three years ago. The top political issue heading into the 2012 election and the Achilles heel of his presidency is to create million of jobs. He has announced a plan to train 10,000 new American engineers every year through a public-private partnership. And through other initiatives such as these he plans to create more jobs.
Smart Phone
Companies like Avago supports the mobile communication sensor business and has a strong order book for their Automobile and Phone Business sector. Both Nokia and RIM has badly affected by the Apple and HTC market share. It is unknown why the RIM stock price dropped 28% in a week ago! Symbian is a sunset mobile platform and Blackberry is also losing ground to iOS and Android. Sooner or later the largest company in the Smart Phone business sector may be over taken by Apple and followed by HTC to be the 2nd largest Smart phone company in the world.
Apple
Assuming Apple iPhone5 will be launched in September, this will prove “Must Have” standard for people to buy and/or replace the older iPhone4. The market will be stimulated, the second phase of higher Chip demand should commence in September.
The expansion plan for semiconductor nest purchase will commence in September to be delivered in an October/November time frame, and we should enjoy a strong demand of semiconductor equipment by September- December Q4 2011.
Summary
The demand for Automobile components will be slow by Q4 11, but this will be balanced by an increased demand for components for non-ipad tablet, IpadII, Smart phone and Iphone . We will see a slight growth of 5% for semiconductor between Q2 and Q3 compared to figures in Q1 Q2. After Q3 we will see some flattening of sales and a down turn of 4-7% by Q4. The next big demand for Chips will result in achieving double-digit substantial growth in Q1 2012, due projected job growth in the US and huge demand from China from the middle class for more mobile communication device, smart phone, electronics consumers products.
The Asian Political situation will remain more or less stable with exception of the situation in the South China Seas. Between China, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam, Chinese tensions has risen in the region in the past month with concern that China is becoming more assertive in its claim to territorial waters. It is estimated they are seeking to form a large U-shape area over most of the sea's 648,000 square miles (1.7 million square km), including the Spratly and Paracel archipelagos. Gates of US is supporting the maritime defence capability of the Philippines on 24 June. China Leader Wen Jia Bao told UK media yesterday that he will try to keep China’s inflation below 5% and maintain annual Growth target of 7% or even 8% for this year. If that is the case, this world’s fastest growing and at same time largest market will help to keep Semiconductor Chips and Equipment demand on a healthy growth. We will have to wait and see how this develops!
HK Snob 27 June 2011
Sunday, June 19, 2011
The Semiconductor Development from a Single Transistor to 3D-chip.
The first transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories on December 16, 1947 by William Shockley. It replaced Vacuum tubes in the years after gradually, and Radio was marked on the case as Solid State to interpret the durability of Transistor. Shock in a much high order than vacuum tubes, on the other hand it operates in less power and energy than the vacuum tube, and It is pretty SMALL.
In 1959 both TI and Fairchild parties applied for patents of IC. Jack Kilby and Texas Instruments received U.S. patent #3,138,743 for miniaturized electronic circuits. Robert Noyce and the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation received U.S. patent #2,981,877 for a silicon based integrated circuit. The two companies wisely decided to cross license their technologies after several years of legal battles, creating a global market now worth about $1 trillion a year.
In 1961 the first commercially available IC came from the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. All computers then started to be made using chips instead of the individual transistors and their accompanying parts. Texas Instruments first used the chips in Air Force computers and the Minuteman Missile in 1962. The original IC had only one transistor, three resistors and one capacitor and was the size of an adult's pinkie. They used the chips to produce the first electronic portable calculators later.
The first integrated circuits contained only a few transistors. Called "small-scale integration" (SSI), Early linear ICs such as Plessey SL201 or Philips TAA320 had as few as two transistors. The term Large Scale Integration was first used by IBM scientist Rolf Landauer when describing the theoretical concept, from there came the terms for SSI, MSI, VLSI, and ULSI.
SSI circuits were crucial to early aerospace projects, and vice-versa. Both the Minuteman missile and Apollo program needed lightweight digital computers for their inertial guidance systems. The Minuteman missile program and various other Navy programs accounted for the total $4 million integrated circuit market in 1962, and by 1968, U.S. Government space and defense spending still accounted for 37% of the $312 million total production. The demand by the U.S. Government supported the nascent integrated circuit market until costs fell enough to allow firms to penetrate the industrial and eventually the consumer markets. The average price per integrated circuit dropped from $50.00 in 1962 to $2.33 in 1968. Integrated circuits began to appear in consumer products by the turn of the decade, a typical application being FM inter-carrier sound processing in television receivers.
In the late 1960s, introduced devices which contained hundreds of transistors on each chip, called "medium-scale integration" (MSI).
They were attractive economically because while they cost little more to produce than SSI devices.
Later, driven by the same economic factors, led to "large-scale integration" (LSI) in the mid 1970s, with tens of thousands of transistors per chip.
Integrated circuits such as 1K-bit RAMs, calculator chips, and the first microprocessors, that began to be manufactured in moderate quantities in the early 1970s, had under 4,000 transistors. True LSI circuits, approaching 10,000 transistors, began to be produced around 1974, for computer main memories and second-generation microprocessors.
Remember your Texas Instrument Programmable Calculator when you was in the University in the 70’s.
VLSI Very-large-scale integration IC
Upper interconnect layers on an Intel 80486DX2 microprocessor. The final step in the development process, starting in the 1980s and continuing through the present, was "very large-scale integration" (VLSI). The development started with hundreds of thousands of transistors in the early 1980s, and continues beyond several billion transistors as of 2009.
Multiple developments were required to achieve this increased density. Manufacturers moved to smaller rules and cleaner fabrication, through the use of advance semiconductor equipment. They could make chips with more transistors and maintain adequate yield. The path of process improvements was summarized by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). Design tools improved enough to make it practical to finish these designs in a reasonable time. The more energy efficient CMOS replaced NMOS and PMOS, avoiding a prohibitive increase in power consumption.
In 1986 the first one megabit RAM chips were introduced, which contained more than one million transistors. Microprocessor chips passed the million transistor mark in 1989 and the billion transistor mark in 2005. The trend continues largely unabated, with chips introduced in 2007 containing tens of billions of memory transistors.
ULSI, WSI, SOC and 3D-IC
To reflect further growth of the complexity, the term ULSI that stands for "ultra-large-scale integration" was proposed for chips of complexity of more than 1 million transistors.
Wafer-scale integration (WSI) is a system of building very-large integrated circuits that uses an entire silicon wafer to produce few single "super-chip". Through a combination of large size and reduced packaging, WSI could lead to dramatically reduced costs for some systems, notably massively parallel supercomputers. The name is taken from the term Very-Large-Scale Integration, the current state of the art when WSI was being developed.
A system-on-a-chip (SoC or SOC) is an integrated circuit in which all the components needed for a computer or other systems are included on a single chip. The design of such a device can be complex and costly, and building disparate components on a single piece of silicon may compromise the efficiency of some elements. However, these drawbacks are offset by lower manufacturing and assembly costs and by a greatly reduced power budget: because signals among the components are kept on-die, much less power is required.
POP is package on package that is to stack the package on top of another package. The target is to increase the function and minimize the chip size both x and y axis.
On Packaging side, memory Chip is the competitive technology that is to stack up many as 10 chips on top the other on both side of the substrates, whereby, tiny gold wire of diameter 0.008 inch are used to interconnect the chips to the lead of the outer package by using the speed of 20 wires per second provided by the world fastest Gold ball bonder supplied by the major equipment supplier ASM and K & S. and the total package is only 1mm thick. This results that we can have an USB memory stick that can have 32G memory.
While more chips are built on a single chip and is operation in Giga operations in a second, technology is how to do Chip cooling down, the material, the thermal management, and the selection of the substrate matching the chip as not to crack the chip due to temperature rising and mechanical expansion. H how to apply the state of the Art o Cooling system by Air, Fins and Fans, water embedded porous copper material for efficient cooling such as Metaform. When we do Google , the Google server and network will operate and generate certain Kilo of CO2 in the world. As the microprocessor operate and that generate heat, so some one has proposed to install the server in the Polar area.
3D chips are expected to solve a number of problems for chipmakers who are aiming for performance increases in ever-smaller chips. As transistor density rises, the wires connecting them have become both thinner and closer together, resulting in increased resistance and overheating. And that leads to the demand of super accurate Gold ball bonder that connect thousand wires inside the chip here to there. These problems cause signal delays, packaging concern for the chip, limiting the clock speed of central processing units.
A three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D-IC) has two or more layers of active electronic components that are integrated both vertically and horizontally into a single circuit. Communication between layers uses on-die signaling, so power consumption is much lower than in equivalent separate circuits. Judicious use of short vertical wires can substantially reduce overall wire length for faster operation.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is vying with Intel to become the first company to sell three-dimensional chips that boost the density of transistors in a single semiconductor by up to 1,000 times.
TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker in the world, could make its first 3D chips commercially available before the end of 2011, according to a person close to the situation who requested anonymity. The timeframe for TSMC matches the end-2011 schedule that Intel has set for the launch of its 3D Tri-Gate chips, which the company expects to be the world's first commercial 3D chip and the most significant advance in chip technology since the development of the chip transistor in the 1948.
With several layers of silicon stacked together, a 3D chip can achieve performance gains of about a third while consuming 50 percent less power. For this reason, 3D chips are particularly well suited to power new generations of mobile devices such as tablets and mobile phones, and to offer more operative hours from the battery cell. Businesses where Intel has so far failed to establish a significant presence.
3D chips look more attractive because of their greater density, it is more difficult to make them because of the testing issues. If you have five stacked dies and one of the dies is bad, you have to scrap the whole thing. The Yield is a challenge!
TSMC is developing so-called 2D chips that replace an organic polymer substrate with silicon to boost transistor density. Communications chipmaker Xilinx has contracted TSMC to make its Virtex-7 field programmable gate array (FPGA) using TSMC's 2D chip technology that puts three chip dies on one silicon substrate. Xilinx said on March 8 that it expects the first samples of the Virtex-7 485T FPGA to be available by August.
TSMC has been working closely with chip packagers and providers of design automation software to help commercialize 3D chip technology.
In April 2007, IBM and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) researchers announced the first versions of 3D chips with support from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). The 3D chips combined several layers of silicon using a technique called wafer bonding.
IBM's technique used a silicon base with active wafers layered on top. This technology allowed a processor to be placed on the bottom of the stack with memory or other components layered across the top, resulting in a thousand-fold reduction in connector length. The greater transistor density reduced the distance data has to travel, reducing processing time.
IBM used through-silicon vias (TSVs) to connect stacks of multiple chip components. TSVs allow for more efficient heat dissipation through the stack to cooling systems that improve power efficiency.
In 1959 both TI and Fairchild parties applied for patents of IC. Jack Kilby and Texas Instruments received U.S. patent #3,138,743 for miniaturized electronic circuits. Robert Noyce and the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation received U.S. patent #2,981,877 for a silicon based integrated circuit. The two companies wisely decided to cross license their technologies after several years of legal battles, creating a global market now worth about $1 trillion a year.
In 1961 the first commercially available IC came from the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation. All computers then started to be made using chips instead of the individual transistors and their accompanying parts. Texas Instruments first used the chips in Air Force computers and the Minuteman Missile in 1962. The original IC had only one transistor, three resistors and one capacitor and was the size of an adult's pinkie. They used the chips to produce the first electronic portable calculators later.
The first integrated circuits contained only a few transistors. Called "small-scale integration" (SSI), Early linear ICs such as Plessey SL201 or Philips TAA320 had as few as two transistors. The term Large Scale Integration was first used by IBM scientist Rolf Landauer when describing the theoretical concept, from there came the terms for SSI, MSI, VLSI, and ULSI.
SSI circuits were crucial to early aerospace projects, and vice-versa. Both the Minuteman missile and Apollo program needed lightweight digital computers for their inertial guidance systems. The Minuteman missile program and various other Navy programs accounted for the total $4 million integrated circuit market in 1962, and by 1968, U.S. Government space and defense spending still accounted for 37% of the $312 million total production. The demand by the U.S. Government supported the nascent integrated circuit market until costs fell enough to allow firms to penetrate the industrial and eventually the consumer markets. The average price per integrated circuit dropped from $50.00 in 1962 to $2.33 in 1968. Integrated circuits began to appear in consumer products by the turn of the decade, a typical application being FM inter-carrier sound processing in television receivers.
In the late 1960s, introduced devices which contained hundreds of transistors on each chip, called "medium-scale integration" (MSI).
They were attractive economically because while they cost little more to produce than SSI devices.
Later, driven by the same economic factors, led to "large-scale integration" (LSI) in the mid 1970s, with tens of thousands of transistors per chip.
Integrated circuits such as 1K-bit RAMs, calculator chips, and the first microprocessors, that began to be manufactured in moderate quantities in the early 1970s, had under 4,000 transistors. True LSI circuits, approaching 10,000 transistors, began to be produced around 1974, for computer main memories and second-generation microprocessors.
Remember your Texas Instrument Programmable Calculator when you was in the University in the 70’s.
VLSI Very-large-scale integration IC
Upper interconnect layers on an Intel 80486DX2 microprocessor. The final step in the development process, starting in the 1980s and continuing through the present, was "very large-scale integration" (VLSI). The development started with hundreds of thousands of transistors in the early 1980s, and continues beyond several billion transistors as of 2009.
Multiple developments were required to achieve this increased density. Manufacturers moved to smaller rules and cleaner fabrication, through the use of advance semiconductor equipment. They could make chips with more transistors and maintain adequate yield. The path of process improvements was summarized by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). Design tools improved enough to make it practical to finish these designs in a reasonable time. The more energy efficient CMOS replaced NMOS and PMOS, avoiding a prohibitive increase in power consumption.
In 1986 the first one megabit RAM chips were introduced, which contained more than one million transistors. Microprocessor chips passed the million transistor mark in 1989 and the billion transistor mark in 2005. The trend continues largely unabated, with chips introduced in 2007 containing tens of billions of memory transistors.
ULSI, WSI, SOC and 3D-IC
To reflect further growth of the complexity, the term ULSI that stands for "ultra-large-scale integration" was proposed for chips of complexity of more than 1 million transistors.
Wafer-scale integration (WSI) is a system of building very-large integrated circuits that uses an entire silicon wafer to produce few single "super-chip". Through a combination of large size and reduced packaging, WSI could lead to dramatically reduced costs for some systems, notably massively parallel supercomputers. The name is taken from the term Very-Large-Scale Integration, the current state of the art when WSI was being developed.
A system-on-a-chip (SoC or SOC) is an integrated circuit in which all the components needed for a computer or other systems are included on a single chip. The design of such a device can be complex and costly, and building disparate components on a single piece of silicon may compromise the efficiency of some elements. However, these drawbacks are offset by lower manufacturing and assembly costs and by a greatly reduced power budget: because signals among the components are kept on-die, much less power is required.
POP is package on package that is to stack the package on top of another package. The target is to increase the function and minimize the chip size both x and y axis.
On Packaging side, memory Chip is the competitive technology that is to stack up many as 10 chips on top the other on both side of the substrates, whereby, tiny gold wire of diameter 0.008 inch are used to interconnect the chips to the lead of the outer package by using the speed of 20 wires per second provided by the world fastest Gold ball bonder supplied by the major equipment supplier ASM and K & S. and the total package is only 1mm thick. This results that we can have an USB memory stick that can have 32G memory.
While more chips are built on a single chip and is operation in Giga operations in a second, technology is how to do Chip cooling down, the material, the thermal management, and the selection of the substrate matching the chip as not to crack the chip due to temperature rising and mechanical expansion. H how to apply the state of the Art o Cooling system by Air, Fins and Fans, water embedded porous copper material for efficient cooling such as Metaform. When we do Google , the Google server and network will operate and generate certain Kilo of CO2 in the world. As the microprocessor operate and that generate heat, so some one has proposed to install the server in the Polar area.
3D chips are expected to solve a number of problems for chipmakers who are aiming for performance increases in ever-smaller chips. As transistor density rises, the wires connecting them have become both thinner and closer together, resulting in increased resistance and overheating. And that leads to the demand of super accurate Gold ball bonder that connect thousand wires inside the chip here to there. These problems cause signal delays, packaging concern for the chip, limiting the clock speed of central processing units.
A three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D-IC) has two or more layers of active electronic components that are integrated both vertically and horizontally into a single circuit. Communication between layers uses on-die signaling, so power consumption is much lower than in equivalent separate circuits. Judicious use of short vertical wires can substantially reduce overall wire length for faster operation.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is vying with Intel to become the first company to sell three-dimensional chips that boost the density of transistors in a single semiconductor by up to 1,000 times.
TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker in the world, could make its first 3D chips commercially available before the end of 2011, according to a person close to the situation who requested anonymity. The timeframe for TSMC matches the end-2011 schedule that Intel has set for the launch of its 3D Tri-Gate chips, which the company expects to be the world's first commercial 3D chip and the most significant advance in chip technology since the development of the chip transistor in the 1948.
With several layers of silicon stacked together, a 3D chip can achieve performance gains of about a third while consuming 50 percent less power. For this reason, 3D chips are particularly well suited to power new generations of mobile devices such as tablets and mobile phones, and to offer more operative hours from the battery cell. Businesses where Intel has so far failed to establish a significant presence.
3D chips look more attractive because of their greater density, it is more difficult to make them because of the testing issues. If you have five stacked dies and one of the dies is bad, you have to scrap the whole thing. The Yield is a challenge!
TSMC is developing so-called 2D chips that replace an organic polymer substrate with silicon to boost transistor density. Communications chipmaker Xilinx has contracted TSMC to make its Virtex-7 field programmable gate array (FPGA) using TSMC's 2D chip technology that puts three chip dies on one silicon substrate. Xilinx said on March 8 that it expects the first samples of the Virtex-7 485T FPGA to be available by August.
TSMC has been working closely with chip packagers and providers of design automation software to help commercialize 3D chip technology.
In April 2007, IBM and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) researchers announced the first versions of 3D chips with support from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). The 3D chips combined several layers of silicon using a technique called wafer bonding.
IBM's technique used a silicon base with active wafers layered on top. This technology allowed a processor to be placed on the bottom of the stack with memory or other components layered across the top, resulting in a thousand-fold reduction in connector length. The greater transistor density reduced the distance data has to travel, reducing processing time.
IBM used through-silicon vias (TSVs) to connect stacks of multiple chip components. TSVs allow for more efficient heat dissipation through the stack to cooling systems that improve power efficiency.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
The Simple Low Cost Solution to Improve Life time of HP LED (High Power Light Emitting Diode) and CPU of your Note Book Computer
The Temperature of the LED junction is related to the life and reliability performance of a LED, especially Hi Power LED which runs at Hi current at High Power.A reduction of LED junction temperature for 1 degree C would increase the life time for more than 1,000 hours. If we can reduce the Junction temperature of the LED from 135 deg C down to 120 Degrees, it could possible increase the life time of 19,000 hours
Refer to Lumileds LUXEON Rebel Automotive Specification Datasheet DS58 (09/12/18) 8
Automotive White Short-Term Maximum Rating Estimated Lifetime
350 mA, Tc ~120°C, Tj ~135°C 50,000 hours
350 mA, Tc ~135°C, Tj ~150°C 31,000 hours
There are a few points that we should design for a long reliable LED life time.
The life time is inversely proportional to the operative temperature. The Die bonding process should not create any hot spot, such as undesired void between the die and the substrates.
The using of highly conductive Hi Silver Content Silver epoxy would help to conduct as much as it could heat from the Chip on to the substrates. The Selection of Substrates material, ceramic Substrates, or copper base leadframe material could be possible the best conduction for heat transfer from the chip passing through onto the substrate then through the heat sink into the external world. But the CTE must be matched… for best matching CTE with the LED, ceramic Substrates may be a good way for silver epoxy process or Directly Eutectic process for better reliability.
How to conduct the heat from the substrates into the other bigger heat sink!? OR how to conduct the heat energy form the HP LED to an external heat sink.,
Yes, WE have such solution ,,, Metafoam, a new solution to conduct heat energy form a LED to a heat sink.
The solution developed by Metafoam significantly improves the heat management performance of heat pipes by providing a substitute to the currently used wick structures, especially the sintered copper powder.
By providing an open-cell copper foam wick structure instead of a simple copper powder wick, Metafoam allows for much improved material characteristics as much as 76% more , especially higher permeability which results with faster working fluid pumping speed in the heat pipe which result in faster thermal cycle within the heat pipe, thus enhanced heat load capacity.
How does it work!?
There is a micron porous whole material which was made from Copper, a very good heat conductor that fill up the copper pipe, a few drop of water that run and carries the heat from one end into other efficiently.
This can be used as the heat sink for the high beam head lamp for the Audi A8, that is a way to conduct the heat energy from the substrate of the HP LED into the main chassis of the Lamp cover. Cooling the LED bar of Back Light Unit of LCD TV. The heat Sink for those HP LEDs in the Street Lamp.
This kind of heat sink is being intensively tested with heat pipe manufacturers and major computer brands. Proven to be a reliable solution for cooling the Micro-Processor unit.
And that ensures the operation of the CPU would be trouble free! Price is reasonably low.
Visit at Metaform website www.metafoam.com for more.
HK Snob
Monday, June 6, 2011
Samsung Galaxy Tab advance version
We have been hearing Apple Iphone and Ipad are migrating into 4g for quite some time. That lento would cause the Korea Competitor to come into the market.Samsung Electronics is going to launch the Android version Tablet PC with high speed 4G networking technology in July.
This is Samsung Galaxy Tab advance version, one is having 22,6mm screen and one is for 25.6mm. Equipped with 2MP camera, Android Honeycomb OS, dual core Processor, USD$499 to USD$599. Samsung is now the world second largest handphone manufacturer. The Samsung Speaker said: this Galaxy Tab has a bigger memory size, faster download speed... This is a trend for moving into 4G, likely other electronics giant will follow.
HK Snob
Friday, May 13, 2011
Semiconductor Show at Singapore 11-13 May 2011
As usual, most of the major equipment suppliers are participating as to tell that they are still active, No surprise, no new product, as expected as Semicon equipment has been a bloodshed warfield for the last decades; through A & M, 10 companies became three companies.., lesser players would invest going into this competitive business. Leaving the Biggest who can barely make a living by struggling for survival. The end users are the ultimate benificiates as what they pay for would be having tons of technology and billions of mini transistors or Flip Flops embedded. Who knows that there have been walking through a very long semiconductor manufacturing process, and thousands of Process Control points!
From the major exhibitors, from what we see ASM has launched the Heavy Aluminum wire bonder, and the new generation AD838L which is designed for Ceramic substrates base LED die bonding, with Accuracy of +/-20 micron at CpK 1.67, carrier-less design, global 3 or 4 points substrate PRS backlight alignment to match with your ASM or other Silicone liquid lens molding systems at the down stream process. Besides, it has full protection for any damages in the 100mm (4 Inch) Wide Ceramic Substrate, a super tool for your precision die bonding. Twin Eagle twin head gold ball wire bonder with foot print of 1.3X, UPH of 1.8K with competitive price comparing with a Single headed wire bonder... Both Copper and gold ready.
From the major exhibitors, from what we see ASM has launched the Heavy Aluminum wire bonder, and the new generation AD838L which is designed for Ceramic substrates base LED die bonding, with Accuracy of +/-20 micron at CpK 1.67, carrier-less design, global 3 or 4 points substrate PRS backlight alignment to match with your ASM or other Silicone liquid lens molding systems at the down stream process. Besides, it has full protection for any damages in the 100mm (4 Inch) Wide Ceramic Substrate, a super tool for your precision die bonding. Twin Eagle twin head gold ball wire bonder with foot print of 1.3X, UPH of 1.8K with competitive price comparing with a Single headed wire bonder... Both Copper and gold ready.
I am expecting the semicon show will be down sizing in scale as most of the focus of the new Semicon manufacturing expansion will be in China
HK Snob
HK Snob
Monday, April 4, 2011
Texas Instruments to Acqure National Semiconductor
TI to acquire National Semiconductor Combination to strengthen analog portfolio and customer support Texas Instruments has signed a definitive agreement to purchase National Semiconductor in an all-cash transaction of about $6.5 billion. This merger will unite two industry leaders who have a common commitment to solving your analog needs. Both companies will operate independently pending close of the acquisition which is expected to take six to nine months. National's 12,000 products plus TI's 30,000 means more performance, power and packaging options when selecting the right ICs for your application. HK Snob
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Japan Quake Aftermath
We Predicts Quake's Impact on Electronics Will Be Limited March 11 Japan earthquake and tsunami disasters will shave 1.5% from global GDP in 2011 and contribute to a slight softening in the semiconductor and electronics market. These short-term effects will be limited, however, and the market should quickly recover. The Japan disaster will help reduce worldwide GDP growth to approximately 3.4 % this year, compared with an earlier estimation of a 3.9% expansion. This will reduce the global economy by about $260 billion, assuming the Japanese economy declined by 5.2% in 2011. Taking the pessimistic situation of a 3.4% worldwide GDP growth rate in 2011 (as compared to our current forecast of 3.6% growth), and the associated $260 billion negative impact on worldwide GDP, and multiplying it by 2.2% yields an electronic systems sales loss of $5.7 billion. Subtracting $5.7 billion from current 2011 electronic system sales forecast of $1,348 billion would put electronic system sales at about $1,342 billion for this year, an 8.5% increase over 2010 compared to our current forecast of 9%. The forecasts may represent the best short-term outlook for the industry and the worldwide economy, assuming oil prices stay relatively stable at around $100 per barrel. We believe even a worst case scenario where the economy is more heavily affected would still not dramatically Ref. IC Insights HK Snob
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Japan Quake Aftermath
March 11, 2011 14:49: Eastern Pacific coast earthquakes occurred
Epicenter : 373km (NE) of Tokyo
Magnitude : Earthquake close to 9 in the Richter scale occurred (The largest earthquake ever in Japan
Summary of Damage Regions
East coast of Tohoku regions-Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, Fukushima prefecture- and east coast of Kanto region -Ibaraki and Chiba prefecture were damaged directly (by earthquake and tsunami).
So far over 7,000 lives were lost, over 12000 person unfound, and 300,000 homeless
The loss of communication infrastructure (NTT Docomo, etc.), nuclear power plants, etc. in the regions and all industrial manufacturing plants shutdown (temporary or provisional), disruptions occurred.
It appears that some infrastructures of the east coast of Tohoku region -Yamagata and Niigata Prefecture-
- Sendai Airport
- Costal towns damage by 10m tsunami
- Large-scale loss of life
- Onagawa nuclear plant , partly fire, partly driving ban
- Sony's 6 factories shutdown (4 factories in Miyagi, 2 factories in Fukushima
- Murata Manufacturing shutdown (Miyagi and Tochigi Prefecture
- JX Nippon Oil Factory damage
- Toyota Motor, factory shutdown
- Fukushima
- Nissan Motor, 6 factories shutdown
- Panasonic factory disruption (Fukuyama Prefecture factory, Sendai factory in Miyagi Prefecture
- Power supply to 4.4 million households stopped
- Pioneer, factory damage (Aomori , Yamagata Prefecture
- Renesas, factory shutdown
- JFE Holdings, steel factory fire
- Cosmo Oil, factory fire
- JSR, factory production stop
- Tokyo Gas, gas supply stop
- Sumitomo Metal Industries, smelting furnace temporary stop
- Daikin Industries, production stop
- Murata factory was destroyed and his component short ship after the Ipad Production in Foxconn China
Sharp LCD Panel factory shout down and affecting 20% world LCD panel output.
Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Inc. (MGC), Monday that two of its facilities, one in Fukushima prefecture and one in Ibaraki prefecture, shut down due to partial damage to equipment and buildings, Its major product bismaleimide triazine resin, an epoxy resin used in chip making is almost entirely produced by MGC
This shortage of BT would most impact programmable logic vendors Xilinx Inc. and Altera Corp., as well as Qualcomm Inc.
Sanyo, Sharp and Panasonic have already suspended operations at several of their plants. The brand new multibillion dollar Sharp LED display plant in Sakai, which has been designed to handle earthquakes automatically shut down when the first earthquake, tremor was detected.
Sanyo, Sharp and Panasonic have already suspended operations at several of their plants. The brand new multibillion dollar Sharp LED display plant in Sakai, which has been designed to handle earthquakes automatically shut down when the first earthquake, tremor was detected.
The consequence is many sectors of the Japanese factories would be affected and it may take a few month 3-9 months to resume normal operation.
We foresee that this will force them to think a head seriously for overseas factory volume implementation. They will keep some of their high technology products manufacturing overseas whereas Japan
There will be more open opportunity for other overseas countries to gain more exposure for working with Japan
More Investor will shift more portion of their investment into Korean Electronics giants like Samsung and LG!
HK Snob
Friday, March 18, 2011
Semiconductor material Supplier Chain breakdown After Japan Quake
One of the potential problems for the semiconductor industry resulting from supply disruptions in the wake of last week's Japan earthquake could be shortages of bismaleimide triazine resin, an epoxy resin used in chip making. The resin is almost entirely produced by Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Inc. (MGC), Monday that two of its facilities, one in Fukushima prefecture and one in Ibaraki
This shortage of BT would most impact programmable logic vendors Xilinx Inc. and Altera Corp., as well as Qualcomm Inc.
Hitachi Chemical Co. Ltd. makes an alternative resin—MCL-E-679—that has been qualified by a few suppliers, but she said she has not been able to verify whether the production of that material was impacted by the quake. Several Hitachi
Matsumoto noted that MediaTek Inc. does not use BT in its packages, but that Spreadtrum Communications Co. Ltd. does. Matsumoto said Texas Instruments Inc. uses BT in its packages, but that since TI's Miho fab was damaged in the quake and won't return to full production until at least July, the BT issue should be resolved before it becomes a problem for TI.
Amkor Technology Inc. manufacturing facility in Kitakami, Japan, located about 260 miles northeast of Tokyo, has suffered relatively minor damage. The Kitakami facility is currently closed due to power supply interruptions and plans are underway to restore production capabilities at the site when power, gas and water supplies, and transportation systems are stabilized.
The Kitakami facility is Amkor’s smallest operation in both units and revenue, generating approximately $10 million to $11 million of monthly sales prior to the earthquake. The Kitakami facility only provides services to a few Japan-based customers.
Amkor is a major supplier of semiconductors, silicon wafers, specialty chemicals, substrates, equipment and other supplies to the electronics industry, and the industry is currently evaluating the potential effect of the earthquake on the overall supply chain for electronics. Since the earthquake, we have been in close communication with our customers, suppliers and OEMs to analyze the situation and evaluate alternative sources of supply where appropriate. Like many companies in the semiconductor industry supply chain, we operate with multiple suppliers from different geographic regions. This diversification is intended to help mitigate any potential disruptions from events such as these. However, it is too early to comment on the broader impact the earthquake may have on the electronics industry and our business and operations.''
Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc. (ASE) is also obtaining ''molding compound'' from Korea and China Japan
Sources: Semiconductor packaging News.
HK Snob
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