By Mark LaPedus
The auction of ProMOS‘ 300mm fab ended in failure this week. There were no bidders for the Taiwan DRAM fab, as the price was considered too steep, according to reports. The bidding for the fab will re-open next month. At one time, GlobalFoundries, TSMC and UMC were interested in the fabrication facility. Now, Taiwan foundry vendor Vanguard is the leading contender for the facility.

GlobalFoundries is embarking on a long-term strategic initiative, called “Vision 2015,”which will include the expansion of its Singapore-based 300mm fab for advanced mixed-signal processes. However, the company reduced the site workforce by approximately 300 employees, or about 4% percent of its Singapore employee base, due to the softening of the current macro-economic environment.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has elected GlobalFoundries CEO Ajit Manocha as its 2013 chairman and John Kelly III, IBM senior vice president and director of IBM Research, as its 2013 vice chairman.

Applied Materials plans to combine two business units, Energy and Environmental Solutions (EES) and Display, under one leader. Ali Salehpour, a former senior vice president at KLA-Tencor, will join Applied as group vice president and general manager of the EES and Display groups. As part of the changes, Mark Pinto, executive vice president and general manager of EES, and Tom Edman, group vice president and general manager of Display, announced their intention to leave Applied.

For the quarter, Mentor Graphics reported revenue of $268.8 million, non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.32, and GAAP earnings per share of $0.27. “Revenue and earnings were records for Q3. Mentor and the electronic design automation industry continue to benefit from the semiconductor industry’s transition to the next generations of technology,” said Walden Rhines, chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics.

The Collaborative Alliance for Semiconductor Test (CAST), a SEMI special interest group, has elected new leadership. Elected by CAST was Chris Portelli Hale, manufacturing test director at STMicroelectronics, as CAST chair, and Octavio Martínez, senior director of engineering at Qualcomm, as vice chair.

Tokyo Electron Limited (TEL) has cancelled its joint solar venture contract with Sharp and dissolved the joint venture Tokyo Electron PV Ltd. set up by both companies. In February 2008, TEL and Sharp embarked on the development of plasma CVD systems for use in thin-film silicon solar photovoltaic cells. At present, Sharp appears to be in financial trouble. Meanwhile, TEL has also been on an acquisition spree. In March, TEL announced the acquisition of Oerlikon Solar. In May, TEL reached a definitive agreement to acquire NEXX Systems.  In October, TEL acquired FSI International. In November, TEL reached a definitive agreement to acquire Magnetic Solutions Ltd. MSL is engaged in the development, manufacture, and sale of magnetic annealing systems.

David Lam, founder of Lam Research in 1980, and currently chairman of both Multibeam and the David Lam Group, has been selected for induction into the distinguished Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. Other eminent technologists selected for induction include: Aart de Geus, chairman and co-CEO of Synopsys; Martin Hellman, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University; and David Hodges, professor emeritus of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

Here’s the current climate for VLSI Research’s so-called “Weather Report,” which gives a pulse on the IC industry: “The clouds are clearing, revealing a tall mountain to climb. Order activity jumped higher for the first time in nearly six months, led by foundries and logic IDMs. The uptick is seasonal and it’s coming off very low levels as chipmakers remain very cautious about prospects in 2013 due to macro and fiscal uncertainties. Moreover, order activity is down nearly 9 points from last year’s levels, which suggests that the seasonal increase in Q1 will be more subdued from last year. We expect Q1 sales to increase 10% sequentially.”

Despite soft macroeconomic conditions, the market for mobile communications equipment will grow by a robust 13 percent this year, propelled by climbing shipments of mobile handsets and tablets, according to iSuppli.

Samsung and Apple are forecast to dominate the smartphone market this year. In total, these two companies are expected to ship an estimated 353 million smartphones and hold a combined 47% share of the total smartphone market in 2012, according to IC Insights. Smartphone suppliers under pressure include Nokia, RIM, and HTC, each of which is expected to register steep double-digit year-over-year declines in smartphone unit sales this year.

Who’s winning the tablet wars? The answer: Apple, Amazon and Google. The loser? Microsoft. Apple is expected to ship 67.7 million iPads in 2012 and 83.5 million in 2013, according to FBR. The iPad mini is off to a slow start. And Samsung is trailing the pack with the Galaxy Tab. Samsung will ship 6 million Tabs in 2012 and 7.4 million in 2013, according to FBR. Craig Berger, an analyst with FBR, said: “We think Apple will manufacture at least 7.5 million iPad minis in 2012, and 18.5 million units in 2013. We now believe Amazon will manufacture about 10 million units (of the Kindle Fire HD) in 2012 and 15 million in 2013. We think the Google Nexus could move more than 6 million units in 2012 and about 10 million units in 2013. Contrary to what we see for the Kindle Fire and Google Nexus, we believe the first month’s sales of the MS Surface RT tablet have underwhelmed expectations. We estimate production of all Surface tablets, including the x86 models available in 1Q ’13, to be about 3 million units in 4Q ’12, with sales perhaps trending around 3-5 million units in all of 2013.”

By Mark LaPedus
Gartner has revealed its top predictions for IT and strategic technology. Among them: By 2014, three of the top five mobile handset vendors will be Chinese; by 2015, big data demand will reach 4.4 million jobs globally, but only one-third of those jobs will be filled; and by 2016, wearable smart electronics in shoes, tattoos and accessories will emerge as a $10 billion industry.

With about 21 months remaining until publicly traded U.S. component manufacturers must disclose their usage of conflict minerals to the government, the electronics industry appears to be unprepared, according to iSuppli. Conflict minerals are defined as those mined in locales of armed conflict and human rights abuses. These minerals, such as tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold, are used in a wide range of components across the electronics supply chain.

According to IDC, end users’ concerns over foreign governments’ access to cloud data, particularly data stored in the U.S., are misplaced. “Scare stories over the Patriot Act abound, but they are fallacious,” said David Bradshaw, IDC research manager for European public cloud services, on IDC’s site. “The Patriot Act is nothing special, indeed data stored in the U.S. is generally better protected than in most European countries, in particular the U.K.”

Hans Mosesmann, an analyst with Raymond James, said: ”While the Street seems to view AMD as imminently going out-of-business we would caution investors otherwise. AMD’s strategy announcement next week (October 29th) will likely be the unveiling of an ARM 64-bit strategic collaboration. With SeaMicro’s world-class fabric, AMD’s strategic positioning becomes quite powerful. We also remind investors that AMD knows the server market quite well, it has an x86 license and it just hired Apple’s processor architect.”

STMicroelectronics reported its third quarter results. The company also cut jobs and reduced its capital expenditures to about $500 million this year. During the quarter, ST-Ericsson’s NovaThor L8540 LTE ModAp platform and the FD-SOI variant of this application processor product were taped out and sample wafer fabrication started. Samples of both products are expected to be available during Q4. STMicroelectronics will fab the chips. ST-Ericsson is a 50-50 joint venture between Ericsson and STMicroelectronics.

During a conference call to discuss its results, executives from STMicroelectronics remained bullish about its efforts with FD-SOI.

TSMC reported mixed results in the quarter. http://www.tsmc.com/english/default.htm “TSMC reported 3Q results and guided 2013 CapEx to $8.0 billion to $8.5 billion, versus $8 billion in 2012, below our estimate of $9 billion. We believe this is consistent with a weakening macro backdrop, coupled with expectation for Apple business to truly ramp in 2014, as opposed to 2013,” said C.J. Muse, an analyst with Barclays Capital. TSMC is expected to make applications processors at the 20nm node on a foundry basis for Apple.

TSMC has purchased 14 hectares of land near Hsinchu, Taiwan. TSMC plans to build an R&D facility for 450mm wafers, as well as 7nm process development, according to TSMC Chairman Morris Chang on Seeking Alpha. Chang also discussed TSMC’s outlook, CapEx, and other topics.

In partnership with the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC), ATIC will support 14 research initiatives over the coming year spanning Khalifa University, UAE University, American University of Sharjah, Masdar Institute and New York University Abu Dhabi. ATIC owns a majority stake in GlobalFoundries.

Mentor Graphics has released a new product in the HyperLy-nx suite. h In addition, Kalray has completed its new 160 million gate, 3 billion transistor multi-purpose processor array IC using a Mentor’s functional verification, physical design and verification, and design-for-test flow.

AMD announced its collaboration with Microsoft for more than 125 Windows 8-based PC designs from OEMs, including ASUS, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and more.

During a recent press event at the company’s new headquarters in San Jose, Calif., Maxim discussed integration and other trends in analog. The company also revealed a 90nm process technology and discussed a new class of power system-on-a-chip (SOC) products. And the company revealed its directions, including a strong push in the mobility segment.

Most mobile SoC GPUs were shipped by Qualcomm in the first half, according to Jon Peddie Research.

Texas Instruments announced third-quarter revenue of $3.39 billion and net income of $784 million. “For 4Q ‘12, TI guided revenues to fall 6% to 13%. Annual Capex guidance was cut by $200 million to $500 million, as TI dials back additional capital spending, commensurate with the environment,” said Craig Berger, an analyst with FBR.

Broadcom said revenue for the third quarter of 2012 was $2.13 billion. This represents an increase of 8.0% compared with the $1.97 billion reported for the second quarter of 2012 and an increase of 8.7% compared with the $1.96 billion reported for the third quarter of 2011. “Broadcom reported robust 3Q ‘12 results and gave 4Q ‘12 guidance near Street estimates, better than most peers,” Berger said.

KLA-Tencor reported mixed results. “KLA-Tencor’s results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2013 reflect today’s challenging demand environment for the wafer fab equipment industry,” said Rick Wallace, president and CEO.

It was a tough quarter for ATE giant Teradyne. The company reported Q3 revenues of $463 million, up 35% from the same period in 2011. But Q4 orders are down 61% from this quarter  quarter and Q4 revenue is forecast at between $235 million and $260 million.

The Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium (HMCC) — the 3D DRAM effort led by Micron Technology Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. — said that software giant Microsoft Corp. has joined the group.

Last October, memory rivals Samsung and Micron announced the creation of a consortium to develop an open interface specification for a 3D memory technology called the Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC). The HMCC is developing 3D DRAM devices based on through-silicon-via (TSV) technology.

Members of the consortium include Micron, Samsung, Altera, Open-Silicon, Xilinx, IBM and now Microsoft. The technology will enable 3D memory solutions for applications ranging from industrial products to high-performance computing and large-scale networking.

“HMC technology represents a major step forward in the direction of increasing memory bandwidth and performance, while decreasing the energy and latency needed for moving data between the memory arrays and the processor cores,” said K.D. Hallman, general manager of Microsoft’s Strategic Software/Silicon Architectures group.

Last year, Micron disclosed the manufacturing flow for the HMC. Under the plan, IBM will manufacture the controller logic portions of the HMC within its own fab. Micron will make the memory portions – and will assemble and test – the HMC devices within its own operations. Micron has recently set up a 3D DRAM pilot and production line within its 300mm R&D fab in Boise, Ida.

Sandia National Laboratories is developing a supercomputer as part of a DARPA program. In the short term, the lab has found a memory solution for the system: Micron’s HMC.

By Mark LaPedus, SemiMD senior editor

For years, Intel Corp., and to a lesser extent, the systems and memory houses, dictated the roadmaps in the processor, DRAM and other segments.

Traditionally, Intel rolls out a new microprocessor and an associated chipset that supports a particular DRAM interface technology. Now, amid the explosion in social networking, there is new broker in the town. “New applications like Facebook are driving the industry,” said Sherry Garber, an analyst with Convergent Semiconductors, a market research firm.

And the industry is listening, as Facebook claims some 800 million active users and a vast number of servers in its datacenters. At the recent JEDEC Memory Server Forum in Santa Clara, Calif., Jason Taylor, director of technical operations at Facebook, described the company’s server strategy and outlined the company’s wish list — and concerns — in the processor, memory and storage arenas.

In a nutshell, Taylor wants cheaper DRAM and NAND flash. The company also wants lower power memories as well as a “DRAM alternative that is 10x cheaper with a small throughput or latency hit,” he said. At the event, JEDEC and Samsung also outlined their respective roadmaps in the DRAM server market, with DDR4 and 3D chips on the horizon.

At present, Facebook has datacenters in California, Oregon and North Carolina, with plans to build a plant in Sweden. The company configures its servers for six separate and basic types of services: Web, Memcache, Database, Hadoop, Haystack and Feed.

In April, Facebook launched the Open Compute Project, an initiative to share its technology with the industry within its datacenter in Oregon. Facebook is publishing technical specifications and mechanical CAD files for the servers, power supplies, server racks, battery backup systems and building design. AMD, Dell, HP and Intel are among the companies that co-develop technology with Facebook.

Facebook hopes to deliver a 38 percent increase in energy efficiency at 24 percent lower cost. It plans to achieve an initial power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.07, compared with 1.5 for its current facilities.

Not surprisingly, power consumption is one of the major problems in the datacenter, where Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others are looking for technologies to attack the problem.

Dileep Bhandarkar, distinguished engineer and chief architect for the Global Foundations Services unit at Microsoft, said traditional datacenters are sometimes 11 football fields in size and consume 20 to 50 Megawatts of power. The construction costs for a datacenter are $10 million to $15 million per Megawatt.
“In a typical datacenter, for every Watt in server power, there can be another 0.5 Watt to 1 watt consumed for power distribution losses and cooling,” he said during the JEDEC event.

Facebook’s Taylor said the temperatures within a datacenter can reach “85 degrees F in the cold (aisles) and 120 degrees F in the hot (aisles),” thereby propelling the need for new and lower-power technologies.

Another concern is processor scaling and memory failures in multicore systems within the datacenter. The “number of cores is increasing and moving from two to four processors. (We are) starting to see scaling issues at four processors related to NUMA node count,” Taylor said. NUMA, or Non-Uniform Memory Access, “is a shared memory architecture that describes the placement of main memory modules with respect to processors in a multiprocessor system,” according to Intel.

For the Web applications, there is “1 to 2GB of shared memory per Web server” within Facebook, Taylor said. “Large hits allocate 40 to 50MB.”

The trouble is that “RAM failure rates are high enough to be a significant source of service events” within Facebook, he said. Some analysts have said that the industry is getting somewhat lax on DRAM testing — or simply not even testing parts — as a means to cut IC test costs.

Taylor also outlined the company’s wish list. Interestingly, Facebook, according to Taylor, is looking for “cheaper RAM with more latency or less throughput,” without elaborating. A lower latency memory could be a possible means to reduce the power-hungry refresh cycles in a DRAM.

Like most in the industry, Facebook is also looking for a “DRAM alternative.” Several companies are developing next-generation memory types — such as memrisistors, MRAM, phase-change and RRAM — but all of these technologies are still in the early stages despite years of R&D. The ability to make and scale these newfangled devices remain a challenge.

Taylor also said that Facebook is looking for cheaper but slightly slower NAND flash, which would operate somewhere around “100k IOPS per ~1TB” or roughly “100k IOPS per ~2TB.” The Facebook technologist may have implied that the company is looking for NAND with better reliability.

On the other hand, solid-state disk (SSD) storage has “fantastic performance,” he said. “Flash has changed the game.”