Finance

For the 4th year running, PC shipments will decline this year, says IDC, while tablet and 2-in-1 sales will also decline but more slowly.

Watch out Qualcomm, Avago/Broadcom is coming for you. This is the clear message from the agreed $37bn deal which will see Avago Technologies acquire Broadcom. This has the potential to be the largest and most significant merger in the semiconductor industry since the hiatus of the credit-crunch in 2008/9, perhaps of all-time. It is no surprise it addresses the communications ...

A highly sensitive resist which could speed up EUV production by 10x has been developed by Japan’s EUVL Infrastructure Development Centre (Eidec).

Avago Technologies has agreed to acquire Broadcom in a $37bn deal. The deal will create a major supplier of communications chips with annual revenues of approximately $15bn, around $8bn of which belong to Broadcom. This would make it larger than Texas Instruments comms business but smaller than market leading wireless chip supplier Qualcomm. The combined company will adopt the Broadcom name. ...

NXP Semiconductors has agreed to sell its RF power business to Chinese private equity firm Jianguang Asset Management  for $1.8bn. The sale of the RF power business, which supplies RF power amplifiers to the mobile phone basestation market, seems to have been a element in the proposed merger of NXP with Freescale Semiconductor. Proceeds from the sale of the RF Power business will ...

sureCore, the Sheffield low power SRAM IP company, has announced commercial availability of its first, ultra-low power, embedded SRAM IP. The silicon proven, 28nm FDSOI production design targets applications demanding long battery life with minimal operating and stand-by power performance.

It is an unfortunate truism that many start-ups fail because they don’t pay attention to the cash-flow.

Rohm is spending Y450m buying Renesas’ 8inch Shiga fab. After completing the deal, planned for February next year, which involves leasing the land and buildings, the line will mainly make IGBTs, mosfets and piezoelectric MEMS on a 0.15μm process, and will be Rohm’s main site for power and MEMS.  “Rohm regards power and sensor devices as one of the four growth engines ...

Six top 20 companies had 20%+ growth in Q1 compared to Q1 2014, reports IC Insights. Mediatek entered the top 10 while ST dropped out. Sharp and UMC moved into the top 20 while Nvidia and AMD moved out.

The SEMI book-to-bill was 1.04 in April compared to 1.10 in March and 1.03 in February.