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1. Will the semiconductor market slowdown in 2018? Will these companies not;
Set the micro-mesh news, the global semiconductor market experienced strong growth this year, the growth rate next year is expected to slow down, but Wells Fargo (Wells Fargo) that many of the chip stocks can be expected, optimistic about Intel, Micron, AMD and so on.
David Wong, an analyst at Wells Fargo, said that the semiconductor industry started to recover from the second half of 2016. This trend is expected to continue until next year, but growth may slow down in 2018. He pointed out that in recent years the growth of the semiconductor industry Are below the standard, and the pent-up demand burst in 2016, prompting the recovery growth of the semiconductor market. The global GDP growth rate in 2017 and 2018 will remain in the range of 3.4-3.5%. The data show that in 2012 to 2016 There has been a considerable amount of pent-up demand in the semiconductor end-markets created in the year, which propelled the semiconductor recovery in 2017 and 2018, possibly up to 2019.
In terms of memory, memory sales are expected to grow by almost 60% in 2017 and continue to expand in 2018, though the rate of increase will slow sharply and the growth rate is expected to reach 40% at the beginning of 2018 and to less than 10% by the end of 2009. For example, DRAM and NAND Market, although market growth will be slower and slower, the current DRAM price hikes and the move to '3-D' NAND will benefit memory makers such as Micron. In general, the continued growth of the storage market will affect memory chips Manufacturers and semiconductor equipment manufacturers have a positive impact, but also note that there is a risk of a hard-braking risk for high levels of growth in storage in 2017.
According to the supply chain, DRAM will continue to be out of stock in the first half of next year. Although the industry intends to increase its production capacity, the new capacity will fall into late next year and early next year. Therefore, DRAM supply growth in the first half of 2018 will only depend on 1x Nano upgrade, the overall demand is still in short supply, the price continued to be bullish, South Asia Branch, Winbond, A-DATA will continue to benefit.NAND Flash and NOR Flash out of stock in the first half of next year you can get relief.Supply including Samsung, Toshiba, SK hynix, Micron and other second-half to speed up the 3D NAND production capacity and technology conversion, yield has continued to improve, next year after the production capacity can be sufficient supply. NOR Flash also due to mainland China Yangtze River Storage and SMIC out, plus Power crystal into OEM market, production capacity increased in the first half of next year, the demand side into the traditional off-season, the market conditions are expected to tend to supply and demand balance.
David Wong believes that driverless cars are another highlight of the semiconductor industry. He is especially optimistic about Intel's development in this area. He believes that the acquisition of Mobileye Intel leads the field of driverless car chips through the acquisition of Mobileye.
In March 2017, Intel announced a $ 15 billion acquisition of Mobileye, an Israeli information technology company, which won an important bar for autopilot technology and laid the foundations for a future one-third of the autonomous driving world for Intel, Qualcomm and Nvidia. The EyeQ4 driverless chip with its 7nm FinFET process will go on sale next year, the EyeQx chip from Mobileye, and the EyeQ5 chipset in 2020. EyeQ5's main rival is the NVIDIA Xaiver or Drive PX2 platform.
Electronics account for over 80% of today's automotive innovations. As automotive automation continues to grow, semiconductor components such as Maxim, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, and others will also grow from autonomous vehicles to the overall car market Benefit.
In addition, he is optimistic about the server chip, especially in machine learning related areas. He said: 'We think the data center is the key to some important new growth areas in the future, including artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, Internet of Things and 5G communications.' In this regard, AMD's new chip Epyc in 2018 will be dazzling performance.
AMD has been the No. 2 supplier of x86 processors in the past in the server space, however, years ago, AMD's server offerings lagged behind Intel's performance and its share of server processors has dropped to negligible levels. Mid-year, AMD introduced a new server processor, the EPYC series, which appears to have very competitive performance characteristics. Wells Fargo considers EPYC to provide AMD with the ability to re-compete with x86 server processors, so AMD Will start to gain some market share in the server processor market. Shipments will grow from less than 1% market share in 2017 to 5% by the end of 2018, 10% by the end of 2019, and revenue will grow to 3% by the end of 2018 % Market share and 6% by the end of 2019.
In this regard, Jibbon Semiconductor Research Center data show that the data center server demand will become the key to the overall server market shipping growth is expected worldwide server shipments in 2018 will grow by 5.53%, Intel and AMD new server platform conversion Will fuel the growth of the market.
For Nvidia, he believes the company will face a sharp slowdown in 2018, a significant slowdown in growth relative to the highs of the past two years.
2.QORVO together HUMAX ZigBee-based complete set of intelligent voice assistant system;
Qorvo, Inc., an innovator of RF solutions for the connected world, today announced that its multi-stack, multiprotocol GP712 system-on-chip has been implemented on the new HUMAX Chorus voice assistant based on ZigBee®, which combines a gateway , Sensor devices, cloud platforms and mobile applications are fully integrated, bringing a full suite of smart home systems to operators and driving the Internet of Things (IoT).
According to Gartner's report, worldwide end-use spending on wireless speakers supporting Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA) is expected to increase from $ 720 million in 2016 to $ 3.52 billion, according to Gartner's report Dollars.
The GP712 supports ZigBee and Thread in different RF channels, allowing designers to use a single transceiver for multiple gateway products to serve both protocols simultaneously, eliminating the need to eliminate gateway equipment as a result of protocol standards upgrades. It also features Qorvo's state-of-the-art work area and low-power features with proven RF technology that limits interference.
The GP712 is not only the first platform to be compatible with ZigBee 3.0, it is also the industry's first multi-channel IoT transceiver certified by the Thread protocol.
Cees Links, General Manager of Qorvo's Wireless Connectivity Business Unit, said: "With its Qorvo GP712 for future growth, HUMAX Chorus enables operators to easily deliver a full suite of IoT solutions to consumers." Qorvo is the only solution that enables simultaneous, Companies that support ZigBee 3.0, Thread, ZigBee RF4CE, and ZigBee Green Power have significantly increased the chances of operators and end users accessing smart homes. '
HUE CEO Tae-Hun Kim said: "HUMAX is pleased to be able to partner with Qorvo to integrate its GP712 chipset into our products as a leading provider of gateway solutions that will greatly improve our capabilities for carriers and terminals HUMAX will continue to excel in the expanding smart home market, and our alliance with Qorvo underscores our commitment in this area. "
Qorvo products are designed to solve the toughest RF challenges in the Internet of Things and will be on display at CES 2018 (# CES2018) in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 9-12. Welcome to Sands Expo AD Hall 42531 booth.
For more information on the Internet of Things, download the Qorvo Free eBook Series 'Internet of Things For Dummies®', a two-part series designed to help technicians and non-technical professionals understand Internet of Things e-book download address: www.qorvo.com/iot-for-dummies. In addition, click here to watch a video about the Internet of things: the three cornerstones of the Internet of things.
The Qorvo Wireless Connectivity Business Unit is one of the leading developers of wireless semiconductor system solutions for interconnected devices, offering a comprehensive and technologically advanced array of RF chips and software to power smart home data communications and the Internet of Things.
3. Big data makes IC design difficult to parry?
In the 'big data' era, did chip designers themselves use big data? They faced huge amounts of raw data - from tools provided by different EDA vendors, but did they find a way to optimize with big data And to accelerate the chip design a good way?
When it comes to 'Big data,' now everyone has it all.It is widely found in the fields of biotech, finance, agriculture, education and transportation, and every industry is hoping to reshape its business essence.
However, for the semiconductor industry?
To this end, IC Manage Inc., a provider of solutions for design and IP management software to chip companies, recently announced 'Big Data Labs'.
Dean Drako, chief executive of Dean DrakoIC Manage, described the Big Data Labs as a 'platform' for designing IC design customers 'new design analytics tools based on big data.'
In the 'big data' era, semiconductor companies are already designing ICs for data centers, but the question is whether the chip designers themselves use big data or not, and they already have huge amounts of raw data - from different EDA vendors tool.
But have electronic designers found a great way to optimize and accelerate their designs with big data?
In simple terms, the answer is 'not yet'.
Of course, the semiconductor industry has been using data management software for many years. Gary Smith EDA Principal Analyst Laurie Balch explained that IC Manage has always been committed to providing 'a large amount of data to be kept secure and organized so that it can be accessed by others' But for an analysis tool that allows IC designers to apply data to intelligent decisions, Balch said: 'We're in the early stages of getting started.'
IC Manage is not a traditional EDA supplier and Balch explains that instead of making traditional EDA tools such as simulation, composition or layout, the company's expertise is "EDA Enterprise Tools." Balch described IC Manage as a " IC Design Database Market has a place in the company '.
In an era when electronic design is known for creating large amounts of data, she found that chip suppliers are facing the growing challenge of how to manage their data efficiently, and IC Manage may be the first to propose a solution.
Unstructured data
Drako explained that by definition, 'big data' is made up of a lot of unstructured data.
He admits that the electronic design community has seen the enormous challenges of unstructured data - from a variety of tools designed by different EDA companies.
However, most IC designers do not have enough tools to absorb these things, not to mention how they are understood, which is time-consuming and resource-intensive, after all.
Drako also stressed that it is not easy to concatenate separate data sets between tools and suppliers.
In addition, he added: 'Few industries and companies have enough expertise and resources available to rapidly develop workable insights and create management options and implementation details.
This is where IC Manage wants the company to work.
Drako explains that IC Manage overlays unstructured data with organized design data. "By combining unstructured data such as validation records and structured data (electronic design data), we have provided a hybrid database, 'Let the chip company use it to perform high-performance advanced EDA analysis.
The result of IC Manage's hope is to implement a platform that provides visual analytics to help users create interactive reports.
Chip out of the forecast
This is not the first big data design tool IC Manager offers for IC Manage.
A few years ago, the company developed a big data product called 'Envision Design Progress Analytics' that provided a basis for IC Manage's customers to accurately predict the launch of their new chips.
IC Manage is taking a step forward with the launch of Big Data Labs, which is not enough to organize big data and make it available to the design team or anyone across the company.
IC Manage hopes to further develop (and possibly customize) new tools by working closely with customers (chip companies) and partners (EDA tool providers), allowing designers to track the contributions of each designer and revise their history , IP re-use, and various actions. The resulting tools allow designers to see the impact of their decisions on the design process. Drako said the analysis provided will also help them make informed decisions.
Functional verification tools
IC Manage also introduced Vision Verification, the first verification analysis tool based on the Big Data Labs platform, which offers "near-instantaneous visual analytics" by leveraging the platform's ability to connect to multi-vendor environments.
Drako said: 'To understand what is happening, EnVision Verification takes all the verification data from different EDA vendor environments such as Verilog, Mentor and Cadence and tracks design activities, regression testing and verification status, and errors. Then find out the change.
Without such big data validation, Drako said: 'Traditionally, if you were part of a team of 300 engineers, you might have to spend a lot of time asking:' Have you changed anything? ',' Which Did you test it? "," Who broke it? "Or" Did we miss something? "
With interactive verification results reporting, Drako said: 'Envision helps accelerate functional verification analysis 10 to 100 times, not only identifying bottlenecks, but also finding the root causes of issues that arise during verification.'
Analyst Balch explains that validation is a "big challenge for electronics designers." Because each one's goal is to design and build first-time right-limited At the cost of chip redesign, "designers must validate it." She points out that verification involves many aspects of testing, and "the results vary depending on the operating conditions, and extreme cases must be understood."
The first tool from IC Manage's newest Big Data Labs is this feature validation tool, along with other logical big data analytics products from the company, including physical verification, timing analysis, and power consumption.
Drako pointed out that functional verification includes many components, including simulations for semiconductors, circuits, digital and analog designs, etc. As a result, Balch speculates that IC Manage will be busy for a long time to further develop its functional verification tools, including customization .
Who will use this tool?
Balch said it's undeniable that data management tools are somewhat 'slow to take off' among chip companies. "Given budget, chip designers are more likely to buy core design tools than big data analytics." They do not think this It's important, and it's also true that this only applies to large design teams. '
As the semiconductor industry continues to be involved in huge mergers and acquisitions, the changes in the broader environment may be faster than previously predicted, for example, if Broadcom successfully acquired Qualcomm, imagine how big a design team will face in the two giants Of the data management nightmare.Mixed companies must monitor the progress of different design teams to ensure that we can share design information and IP.
Compile: Susan Hong
(Reference Text: Is Big Data for IC Design Too Big to Manage ?, by Junko Yoshida) eettaiwan