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Will UMC Chip Shipments Drop In The Fall?
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Foundry UMC is expecting its shipments to fall by five percent in the fourth quarter of 2015, as a result of ongoing inventory adjustments within the industry supply chain.
Revenues for the last part of the year will be adversely affected by an about one per cent drop in wafer ASPs and capacity at its plants will slide to 81-83 per cent in the fourth quarter from 89% in the third.
UMC’s had already lowered capacity in the third quarter. At the beginning of the year it was running at 94 percent.
The company’s revenues decreased 7.1 per cent to $1.07 billion in the third quarter, with gross margin slipping below 20 per cent.
UMC net profits were down 62.9 per cent on quarter, as both operating and non-operating income eroded. This is bad news because in the first three quarters of 2015, UMC’s net profits increased 35.8 per cent from a year earlier.
However UMC is continuing to invest in new capital and will spend $1.8 billion.
CEO Po-Wen Yen said that the continuing IC inventory adjustment will dampen fourth quarter wafer shipments, but UMC continues on the path towards long-term growth.
“Throughout 2015, UMC engineers and Fab12A have worked tirelessly to bring several new 28nm product tape-outs into volume production. “UMC is working to bring a timely conversion of new 28nm requirements into production, which will strengthen our business.”
Courtesy-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/will-umc-chip-shipments-drop-in-the-fall.html
Semiconductor Sales Still Down In 2015
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Semiconductor Sales Still Down In 2015 : :: TheGuruReview.net ::
Sales of semiconductors have remained sluggish during 2015 and look set to drop still further in 2016, according to new research from Gartner.
Last quarter, 2.5 percent growth was expected for 2015, but this has been revised down to a one percent drop in the market. 2016 remains predicted to see a 3.3 percent drop.
“We are continuing to see weakness in end-user electronics demand in response to an uncertain economic environment, which is putting a dampener on 2015 spending,” said Takashi Ogawa, research vice president at Gartner. “Next year we are anticipating DRAM manufacturers to respond to oversupply with dramatic reductions in their investment plans.”
The drop likely comes off the back of weak PC sales too, with Gartner last week revealing that, despite the release of Windows 10, sales of devices slumped 7.7 percent in the third quarter.
The future looks brighter, though, and figures for 2017, 2018 and 2019 show significant growth with the losses of 2015 more than recovered as soon as 2017.
A number of key companies, including Intel, have cut spending in the past quarter against a backdrop of slow demand for electronics. This has led in some cases to semiconductor plants significantly shrinking production to avoid a surplus of obsolete chips in the fast evolving industry.
“In the DRAM market, weak end-market conditions combined with new foundries coming on line at Samsung and SK Hynix have created a weaker market than anticipated in our last forecast,” said Ogawa.
“As a result, we anticipate that DRAM manufacturers will move more quickly from investing in new capacity to a maintenance and upgrade existing capacity mode of operation.”
Meanwhile, NAND memory has actually moved to a small predicted growth of 0.1 percent against a 19.4 percent drop predicted last quarter. The rise of NAND thanks to alliances such as the one between SanDisk and HP has led Gartner to predict a 10 percent shift from DRAM to NAND in the next six months or so, while DRAM manufacturers will begin to slow investments around this time next year.
The news comes after reports that SanDisk is looking to consolidate its business by putting itself up for sale to another market player. WD and Micron are said to be likely buyers.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/computing-category/semiconductor-sales-still-down-in-2015.html
Is AMD Splitting Up
AMD has denied rumors that it will split up its business in a bid to rival chip giant Intel.
Sources close to AMD said that the company is planning to divide into two, or spin off certain parts of the business, in order to make it a stronger force in the chip industry.
Three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that AMD is at the initial stage of reviewing, and has asked a consulting firm about its options in trying to turn the company around. The sources said that the deliberations are preliminary and that no decision has been made.
Apparently, one of the options under consideration is separating AMD’s graphics and licensing business from its server business, which sells processors that power data centres.
However, AMD has since denied such speculation. “While we normally would not comment on such a matter, we can share that we have no such project in the works at this time,” a company spokesperson said.
“We remain committed to the long-term strategy we laid out for the company in May at our Financial Analyst Day.”
If the rumours happen to be true, though, and AMD does split its company into two, it would make it the second major technology firm to do so in the past year.
PC maker HP confirmed in October that it would tear itself in half, making two new publicly traded Fortune 50 companies. The decision was down to the firm wanting to focus on the faster growing side of the business.
HP’s split is expected to be completed by the end of this year. HP’s enterprise technology infrastructure, software and services businesses will do business as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and the firm’s market-leading personal systems and printing businesses will operate as HP Inc and retain the current logo.
Is The Chip Market On The Rebound
Don’t let anyone fool you, the chipmarket is still not doing that well and there are a few problems to be sorted out before real money will be made.
FC Tseng, vice chairman for foundry VIS said that handset makers have too much inventory in their warehouses and the much hyped IoT market boom has not yet arrived.
In fact it is looking like 2015 will not be as good as 2014, which was pretty good at least as far as VIS was concerned.
Semiconductor demand for IoT applications will emerge, but no one has really worked out what the key drivers of IoT market growth will be, Tseng said.
Smartphones, devices such as watches, bracelets and glasses are all being identified as the popular applications when it comes to wearables and the Internet of Things.
VIS forecast that the global 2015 semiconductor market will increase 5 per cent in production value to $358 bn, while the foundry sector will grow by a larger 10 per cent on year to about S$50 bn.
VIS chairman and president Leuh Fang warned that the company has seen a low visibility of customer orders for the third quarter of 2015.
VIS reported record revenues and profits for 2014 and has been spending on capital expenditure like a mad thing in 2015.
Will ARM Servers Help HP’s Bottom Line?
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The maker of expensive printer ink HP expects new lower-power servers made with technology from ARM Holdings to make inroads in niche data centres over the next year. If vice president of server engineering Tom Bradicich is right, then it could give Intel a good kicking in its bottom line.
Bradicich said that penetration is low at the moment because the ARM chip was starting from nothing but the take-up is pretty encouraging. HP this week launched new servers made with chips designed by Applied Micro Circuits with intellectual property licensed from ARM. ARM’s supporters, which now include HP say some data centres can be made more cost effective and energy efficient by using them instead of Intel’s server chips.
Bradicich said HP’s new 64-bit ARM-based servers were ideal for handling specialized data-centre workloads like search and scientific analysis. Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Utah plan to use HP’s new servers for scientific analysis and high-performance computing, while PayPal plans to use another version of the servers.
With AMD and other chipmakers working on their own ARM server chips, variety is a key factor for customers that have long depended on Intel, Bradicich said.
Intel has launched its own line of “Atom” low-power server chips to counter the ARM threat. HP offers servers made with Atom chips but said they are not selling that well.
TI Shows Off New Multi-Core DSPs
Texas Instruments has released two evaluation modules sporting its TMS320C665x multi-core digital signal processor (DSP) chips.
Texas Instruments has been pushing its line of DSPs for many years and while the firm now offers DSP and ARM processing on a single board, it still makes a considerable amount of money flogging its C6000 series DSPs. The company has been promoting its multi-core TMS320C665x series DSPs recently and has now released two test boards to help developers get started.
Texas Instruments said the TMDSEVM6657L and TMDSEVM6657LE evaluation modules will include its Multicore Software Development Kit, the Code Composer Studio development environment and demonstration codes. The firm said the difference between the two boards is in their emulators, with the TMDSEVM6657LE having the faster XDS560V2 emulator while the TMDSEVM6657L features a XDS100 emulator.
Ramesh Kumar, business manager of multicore processors at Texas Instruments said, “Our goal has always been to make multicore programming easier and more accessible to developers. With the availability of our new, low-priced C665x EVMs, we are driving our Keystone devices into smaller and more portable products, enabling developers to take advantage of multicore in a wider range of high-performance and portable applications.”