Amid the financial turmoil and economic slowdown, Applied Material, the world largest semiconductor equipment maker, had generously hosted a Applied Material Tech Forum (AMTF) at Raffles City Convention City, Stamford Hotel, Singapore on this Tuesday 4 Nov 2008. I attended the forum with some other colleagues. From the lunch break, I learned that Applied [...]

The current global financial and semiconductor slumps have taken a severe toll on Singapore semiconductor arena. Two Singapore mega fab projects, $4.5b NAND fab by IMFlash Singapore and $2.7b DRAM fab by Qimonda, have scrapped their plans to build fabs in Singapore. As a result, there will be a massive layoff thereafter. It is estimated [...]

Over the last two days, the PC industry was quite excited about Intel’s forthcoming high end discrete graphic chips, Larrabee, which are scheduled to launch some time in end of 2009 or early 2010. Larrabee is expected to compete head on with the GeForce and Radeon graphics chips from NVIDIA and AMD, respectively (Ref). Remarkably, [...]

According to NanoMarkets newest report “Thin Film Photovoltaics Markets: 2008 and Beyond”, thin-film photovoltaic (TFPV) market will grow from almost $2.4 billion ($US) in revenues in 2008 to over $12 billion in 2013. By 2015, NanoMarkets expects that TFPV will have a market opportunity of over $22 billion (Ref). The explosive growth is unfathomable a [...]

The biggest semiconductor trade show in North America, SEMICON WEST 2008 has concluded couple of days ago (15-17 July). One of impending issues facing the semiconductor industry is the lithography solutions for 32nm and 22nm. It is pretty obvious now that EUV lithography will not be deployed for 32nm, and most likely will not be [...]

The world’s second largest microprocessor maker, AMD, has announced their earnings this morning. The company reported a revenue of $1.35 billion, and a net loss of $1.19 billion, in the quarter that ended June 28. A substantial chunk of the loss is the result of a goodwill impairment charge the company took on its now-defunct [...]

iPhone 3G was launched over the last weekend. Within 3 days, more than a million iPhone 3G have been sold (Ref). The iPhone 3G manic is simply amazing and Apple has demonstrated once again its unbeatable marketing prowess. Minutes after the launch, the Internet has published a couple of articles on the teardown analysis of [...]

Amid the soaring oil prices and impending energy crisis, more semiconductor companies are investing in solar. For examples, the world number one microprocessor maker, Intel capital has announcement its $38 million investment in Berlin-based solar module manufacturer Sulfurcell GmbH (Ref). This investment follows Intel last month surprising announcement to spin off a solar cell [...]

On one hand, the soaring oil price produces many challenges to the world such as higher inflation, slower economy and more political turmoils due to oil price hike. On the other hand, it also creates many opportunities for a number of emerging markets and technology such as energy-efficient chips, solar cell, hybrid car, green [...]