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 Dylan McGrath is editor of the EE Times Newsletter, which brings you the latest semiconductor and design news.
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| Editor's Note |
| Remember a few years ago when Applied Materials and other semiconductor equipment vendors were going to leverage their years of experience building complex process tools to start minting money in the suddenly red hot area of photovoltaic (PV) panel manufacturing? Turns out it hasn't been quite that easy.
Applied, the No. 1 chip equipment vendor, plunged headlong into solar and became the leader in PV manufacturing equipment in its first full year in the market, 2008, according to VLSI Research. But Tuesday, Applied CEO Mike Splinter told analysts the company would reduce spending on its SunFab unit, admitting that the market "has not come to fruition as we had hoped."
Of course, the solar market was hurt badly by the recession and the fact that some countries have reduced subsidies on solar equipment. But Applied's SunFab tools have also been plagued by whispers of poor performance. And the tools are based on a thin-film technology called amorphous silicon, which is having trouble keeping pace with conventional crystalline silicon-based solar modules in terms of cost reduction.
Though Splinter did not get into the specifics of how much Applied would cut its SunFab spending, he did emphasize that the move is not a full scale retreat from the space. Applied will continue to market the SunFab technology and will continue to honor contracts in the arena. Splinter also noted that solar growth is now back following the downturn.
PV manufacturing technology remains an important growth opportunity for Applied and other vendors of chip manufacturing equipment (as well as, yes, an important initiative for the future of our planet). But realizing this opportunity won't be—and never was going to be—a walk in the park.
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| Top Story |
Applied to lower investments in SunFab
Applied Materials Inc. plans to lower its investments in its SunFab solar technology amid disappointing results with the technology.
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| Semiconductor News |
Novellus CEO: New (and old) IC growth drivers
It's back to the future in the semiconductor industry. Driven by many of the same dynamics from the 1990s, the semiconductor industry is set for a new and healthy three-to-four year growth cycle, according to the top executive from Novellus Systems.
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Hynix CEO sees chance to reduce debts
Kwon Oh-chul, the incoming CEO of Hynix Semiconductor Inc. (Icheon, Korea), is looking forward to a good year in terms of sales and profits and that this will let Hynix reduce its debts and for banks to offload more of their stake in the company.
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Rapid growth expected for GaN power management ICs
The market for gallium nitride power management chips is expected to grow to $183.6 million in 2013 from virtually zero in 2010, according to market research firm iSuppli, which most of this growth to occur in 2012 and 2013 as technology advancements reduce the cost of manufacturing.
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Intel rolls Xeon chips for high-end servers
Intel Corp. officially rolled out its new high-end x86 server processors, the Xeon 7500 family, using up to eight dual-threaded cores with support from more than twice as many OEMs as Intel's previous high-end server CPUs, including an SGI system delivering a up to 256 processors.
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| Business News |
Applied raises forecast, sees upturn
Citing the IC upturn, Applied Materials Inc. has raised its outlook for 2010.
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Chip maker asks ITC to block iPad sales
Taiwanese chip and touch screen maker Elan Microelectronics has asked the U.S. International Trade Commission to ban the import and sale of some Apple products, including the forthcoming iPad tablet, on the grounds that they allegedly infringe on patents held by Elan.
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Update: Jury says SCO does not own copyright on Linux
A jury in a Salt Lake City Federal court ruled that Novell, not the SCO Group, owns the copyrights to the Unix operating system, at least temporarily protecting a wide range of Linux users whom SCO claimed owned it royalties.
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TV tuner IC vendor gains $16 million in Series E
Xceive Corp., a fabless developer of RF-to-baseband TV tuner ICs, has announced it has secured more than $16 million in a combination of Series E equity and debt financing.
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Energy storage to be a $45 billion market in 2015
The market for batteries, supercapacitors and fuel cells targeting transportation and smart grid applications will more than double from $21.4 billion in 2010 to $44.4 billion in 2015.
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| Design News |
PrimeSense confirms Microsoft 'Natal' design win
PrimeSense Ltd. (Tel Aviv, Israel) a developer of a 3-D recognition sensor technology, has said it is providing the 3-D sensing technology for Project Natal for the Xbox 360 from Microsoft.
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Qualcomm locates augmented reality R&D in Vienna
Wireless chip vendor Qualcomm Inc. (San Diego, Calif.) has opened the Qualcomm Austria Research Center GmbH in Vienna, Austria, as a center for the design and development of augmented reality and related technologies.
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| ESC Silicon Valley |
ESC: The results are in for embedded engineering survey
The 2010 Embedded Market Study is complete and tallied. Big surprises? Yes and no.
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| ESC Silicon Valley 2010 |
| ESC Silicon Valley, the largest most complete technical conference/exhibition in North America where you can see, learn and get hands-on training on emerging embedded products and technologies. Attend and be part of the most valuable and efficient professional development you will experience all year.
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Sponsored by
Synopsys
Combine rapid prototyping with emulation to accelerate your
design cycle
Wednesday, March 31st
9 am PT / 12 pm ET
This webcast will discuss how the features and high-performance
capabilities of FPGA-based rapid prototyping are used as a
natural progression to complement emulation when shortening
development time is critical to the overall success of ASIC and
SoC projects.
Learn more... |
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