| Editor's Note |
| Analysts are sounding the alarm over steeper than expected capital expenditure reductions by China's telecomm vendors. Recall that government stimulus spending on building out China's 3G networks seemed to be the only thing keeping some chip and system vendors from ruin in late 2008 and early 2009. It was inevitable that Chinese telcos would scale back, now that the build out is largely complete. But analysts appear to be caught off guard by the size of the decreases. Overall capex spending by China's carriers is expected to decline 21 percent this year compared with 2009.
So far this year, the outlook has been pretty sunny for chip makers and the broader electronics industry. Tightening of the purse strings by China's telecomm companies will hurt a few companies, including network equipment and programmable logic vendors. But even those firms who won't take a direct hit from the pullback should view this as a big caution sign. It's still possible that forecasted growth for 2010 may not be as robust as some project.
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| Top Story |
China cuts 2010 telecom capex by 21 percent
With its 3G binge over, China's three major telecom operators will cut their spending on capital equipment by more than 20 percent in 2010, a greater than expected decline, driving analyst to anticipate lower revenues for system and chip makers including Ericsson.
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| Semiconductor News |
TSMC breaks ground on LED lighting wafer fab
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan) has held a groundbreaking ceremony for an R&D center and wafer fab to develop and make light emitting diodes for lighting applications.
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February chip sales were steady, says analyst
The three-month average of global chip sales for February is set to be $22.15 billion compared with $22.49 billion, according to Bruce Diesen, an analyst at Carnegie Group (Oslo, Norway).
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Report: India plans wafer fab for LED lighting
De Core Nanosemiconductors Ltd. is planning to spend about 900 crore rupees (about $200 million) building a wafer fab for LEDs in Gandhinagar, Gujurat in the west of India, according to a Business Standard report.
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| Business News |
Silver Lake invests in China's Spreadtrum
Private equity firm Silver Lake (Menlo Park, Calif.) has acquired a minority stake in Spreadtrum Communications Inc. (Shanghai, China), a NASDAQ-traded fabless chip company that makes chips for GSM and TD-SCDMA mobile communications.
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Analysts intrigued by Nintendo's 3-D handheld
U.S. analysts were intrigued and curious following the overnight release of a brief statement by Nintendo saying the company plans to launch within the next year a handheld video gaming system that offers 3-D effects without requiring the use of special glasses.
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Microtune makes deal with activist hedge fund
Microtune reached a deal with activist hedge fund Ramius on nominees to the Microtune's board of directors, the company said.
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| Design News |
Dolphin Integration rolls stem optimized for low leakage
EDA and IP company Dolphin Integration SA (Meylan, France) has introduced an additional stem optimized for low leakage, LL-BTF.
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Wind River and Cavium partner to support Octeon processors
Wind River and Cavium Networks have set up a multi-year strategic partnership to co-market optimized VxWorks and Linux multicore solutions.
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Tanner EDA, Dongbu deliver foundry-certified PDKs
Tanner EDA, a division of Tanner Research Inc. (Monrovia, Calif.), and analog foundry specialist Dongbu HiTek of South Korea have teamed to develop foundry-certified process development kits (PDKs) for critical process nodes.
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Avnet offers Spartan-6 DSP dev kit
Avnet Electronics Marketing is offering the Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA DSP development kit for $1,995, including a device-locked version of ISE Design Suite: System Edition 11.4.
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| Technology News |
NASA awards contract for hypersonic vehicle R&D
NASA is beginning to look at new technologies that could be used to design "hypervelocity vehicles."
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Dylan McGrath is editor of the EE Times Newsletter, which brings you the latest semiconductor and design news.
