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The RF Semiconductor Market – And Why It Matters
The RF Semis Market is about to undergo some dramatic shifts. For the past two years I have been neck deep in that market, but am no longer employed there. So I want to put my thoughts about the market...
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MWC: Semiconductor Consolidation Cont’d
One of the biggest pieces of news last week was the sale of Freescale to NXP. Both companies have products targeting mobile, but neither can be considered overly reliant on mobile. So while this was a...
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RF Semis Update – The More Things Change….
Last week I posted on overview of the RF semis market. I wrote that I expected some big announcements in the space during MWC. I was sadly disappointed. Nothing much happened. Probably the most...
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MWC: A Radical, Crazy Suggestion for Mobile – Intel + Qualcomm
One of the clearest trends over the past few years has been Qualcomm’s dominance of the LTE modem market. I have written about it a bit in the past, and I know there is an ocean of ink being written...
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Activists Target Qualcomm – And Get it Half Right
Last week, activist fund Jana Partners published a letter calling on Qualcomm to take several steps to improve shareholder value. (I know I am late in writing about this, but I literally have a note...
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Jana Vs. Qualcomm – The Only Thing to Fear is Fear Itself
I had an odd conversation recently. Speaking to a friend at Qualcomm, he said that the management team there was really worried about Jana Partners’ activist attack on the company. That did not make...
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The 5 Chip Companies Who Will Buy All the Others
Yesterday, Avago announced it was going to acquire Broadcom. These are both big companies, and their combination puts them squarely into the top five of global chip companies. As I mentioned in...
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Here are 12 chip companies that will probably get bought in the next few years
In my continuing series of listicles, I wanted to follow up my note from last week about the acquirors in semis, with a piece today on the likely targets. The way I look at the industry there are...
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What is the Internet of Things? – Some Rough Math
I have gotten a fair amount of feedback on my notes from earlier in the week. I am poking holes in a lot of growth stories, which has provoked a fair amount of good discussion. After publishing some of...
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Fast Fashion in Chips? Mediatek beats Qualcomm
The Wall Street Journal had a great profile of Indian handset company Micromax yesterday. It was one of those articles I love – comparing one company’s model to that of another in a totally different...
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Qualcomm and China – 2/3rds of the way there: A Follow-up on some past posts.
Back in January, I wrote about Qualcomm’s position in China. At the time, there were rumors that the company was nearing an agreement with the Chinese government addressing the company’s operations...
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The Contortions of the Consumer Electronics Market
There was an interesting analysis from the awesome team at Chipworks (with a good analysis from Ars as well) out last week showing that Apple’s new A9 processor for its iOS devices is being...
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Intel has 1,000 people working on a chip for iPhone? Of course they do
Late last week Venture Beat reported that “Intel has 1,000 people working on chips for the iPhone.” This prompted a bunch of inbound e-mails and a Twitter conversation. After a few back-and-forths, I...
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Should Intel Split in Two? Probably Not
Monday’s post on Intel’s work to win Apple business generated a lot of traffic and Tweets. One follower on Twitter keeps coming at me with good questions. So Frog Man (@accretivegrowth), whoever you...
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The Consumerization of the Automobile Supply Chain
Last week I saw an interesting post on Venture Beat about Acer Launching an Electric All-Terrain Vehicle. This struck a chord because Taiwan-based Acer is a manufacturer of PCs and other consumer...
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Sitting on the end of the Whip
There is a metaphor I hear occasionally to describe semiconductors – the idea of a bullwhip. A big part of running a successful chip company is accurately forecasting demand. Semiconductor...
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Virtual Reality, Virtually There?
I had an interesting e-mail exchange with an old friend recently on the topic of Virtual Reality. That forced me to forced me to clarify my thinking on the subject, and that has gotten me thinking...
View ArticleCES 2016
CES 2016 It is that time of year again. The annual technology conference which everyone loves to hate. Last year I laid out my strategy for approaching mega trade shows like CES. That boils down to...
View ArticleCryptoasset Mining & The Magic of Silicon
Over the weekend, a crypto project called Sia posted about their work in designing their own chip for crypto mining. It’s a long post, with some incredible insight. We wanted to follow up on this with...
View ArticleLet’s build a chip!
Recently, it seems to have become common wisdom that every tech company is going to build its own semiconductors for their hardware needs. Companies seem to be building chips for their own phones, data...
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