Viewpoints

Now China has embroiled Qualcomm in anti-trust, the handset business is getting even tougher, says David Manners. If you’re set up to make $100 chunks of silicon, supplying parts into LTE handsets costing $165 isn’t great for profits. You can’t out-run commoditisation. Be afraid. Be very afraid if you’re in the handset business. Coolpad and Lenovo have launched $165 LTE ...

Neelie Kroes set the European semiconductor industry the task of achieving 20% world market share of IC output, writes David Manners. The CEOs of the big device manufacturers, however, didn’t want to embark on the journey of investment and technological progress. I always thought Neelie would get her way. The redoubtable lady who slapped a billion euro fine on Intel ...

Government and high-tech. The relationship is complex despite what knee-jerk free marketeers may claim, says David Manners. The US government spends far more on microelectronics R&D than any other government and there’s more to the industry than products – process, for example, is just as important and much process development is done in state-funded laboratories, universities and research institutions… It ...

Does Europe have a future in microelectronics or not? As Europe’s largest chip manufacturer, the fate of ST is central to the question explains David Manners. As Europe’s largest chip manufacturer, the fate of ST is relevant to whether Europe has a future in microelectronics or not. So the news that the Italian government is to sell a 13% stake ...

Intel logged a 2% decline in IC sales reports IC Insights, eight points worse than the 6% growth rate displayed by the worldwide IC market. David Manners considers IC Insights’ suggestions for how Intel could take advantage of an IC market expected to increase 7% this year. Everyone loves to tell people what they should do and when someone’s in ...

While 450mm manufacturing may never happen this doesn’t mean the declining cost of electronics will necessarily come to an end. There are still ways, says David Manners, of reducing cost-per-function like 3D transistors for processors and stacked transistors for NAND… 450mm may never happen, according to Mark Durcan, CEO of Micron, the world’s fourth largest semiconductor company. “I am not ...

Following the semiconductor shock of IBM pulling out of chip manufacturing, David Manners considers who could buy and run the IBM fabs, whose processes include SOI and SiGe, and which supply manufacturing process technology to half the world’s major companies: Samsung, GloFo, UMC, ST, Renesas, NEC, Freescale, Toshiba and Infineon. The biggest shockwave the semiconductor industry has had for years ...

The mobile phone market may be saturated, according to Futuresource, but smartphones certainly aren’t going away. New features, technology, form-factors and designs will see to that, notes David Manners, thanks to human nature. Churn. It’s all about churn and it’s always been that way whether you’re selling wireless phone subscriptions, cars, PCs or mobile devices.

A bad outlook for virtual money Bitcoin? As a Bitcoin Foundation boss faces money laundering charges in New York, David Manners wonders if anyone can explain the value of Bitcoin virtual currency in simple terms. Bitcoin is something I don’t understand and I’ve never met anyone who can explain it in a way that convinces me that they understand it. ...

Much as masters of the desktop and laptop – Microsoft and Intel – may wish otherwise, the PC market is declining as consumers ditch PCs in favour of tablets. Analysts Canalys – recording the PC market falling 6.9% and the tablet market growing 65.2% – are just the latest to record the trend, notes David Manners. If you take the ...