Finance

One of Silicon Valley’s finest CEOs is to take over the chairmanship of Applied Materials. Wim Roelandts, a hugely successful and respected CEO at Xilinx, will succeed Mike Splinter as chairman of the Applied board with immediate effect. Roelandts brought the old HP management touch to Xilinx. He spent 29 years at HP in its glory years when it was ...

Fab equipment spending is forecast to depart from the typical historic trend over the past 15 years of two years of spending growth followed by one of decline, says SEMI, for the first time equipment spending could grow every year for three years in a row: 2014, 2015, and 2016. Spending in fab equipment will rise 11% to $38.7 billion ...

April semiconductor sales were $27.6 billion which was 0.4% down on March but 4.8% up on April 2014, says the SIA. “Year-to-year semiconductor sales increased for the 24th straight month in April, thanks largely to continued growth in the Americas and Asia Pacific regional markets,” says SIA CEO John Neuffer, “the global industry has posted higher sales through April than ...

Skeleton Technologies, the German-Estonian manufacturer of ultracapacitors, has raised €9.8 million to ramp production of graphene-based ultracapacitors.

NXP is to raise $1 billion to help pay for its Freescale acquisition. It will offer $500 million senior notes due 2020 and $500 million senior notes due 2022. $2 billion of the $11.8 billion purchase price for Freescale is payable in cash. NXP has $1.4 billion in cash and is selling its RF power business for $1.88 billion. NXP ...

GloFo, working with Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor, has developed new digital design flows for RTL to GDS implementation for its 14nm finfet process. Integrated with a technology-proven process design kit (PDK) and early-access standard cell libraries, the flows create a digital design “starter kit” that provides designers with a built-in test case for out-of-the-box physical implementation testing and analysis of ...

Despite the increasing use of wide-bandgap materials like SiC and GaN, silicon will account for 87% of the $20 billion power electronics market says Lux Research. Innovations in circuit design, control methods and module packaging will help silicon hold off adoption of WBG materials in many applications, particularly in the near-term on account of silicon’s high availability and volumes. Lux ...

Intel plans to buy FPGA company, Altera. If successful, and it is difficult to think of a reason why it shouldn’t, the $17bn deal will be Intel’s largest ever acquisition. On an Intel scale, Altera is a relatively small company with sales revenues of $2bn in 2014. Intel is paying a fairly high price for the company. So what has ...

Nantero, the Boston carbon nanotube IC specialist, has raised another $31.5 million. “We were targeting $15 million and ended with more than double,” Nantero Co-Founder and CEO Greg Schmergel told Electronics Weekly.

Intel’s takeover of FPGA supplier Altera seems to be back on. Reports over the weekend from the US seem to indicate that the processor firm will make a $17bn bid to buy the FPGA maker, perhaps today. A previous takeover move earlier this year failed on price. It seems that Intel is now prepared to increase its offer to well ...