Nineteen new fabs and lines are forecasted to begin construction in 2016 and 2017, according to SEMI. While semiconductor fab equipment spending is off to a slow start in 2016, it is expected to gain momentum through the end of the year. For 2016, 1.5% growth over 2015 is expected while 13% growth is forecast in …
PCs Falling Faster Than Expected
The two largest chip markets will each have sub-10% growth this year. PC shipments this year are expected to fall 7.3%, according to IDC. This cut comes after Q1 shipments fell 12.5% Y/Y vs. the anticipated 11.3% decline. “The latest update reflects continuing pressure on PC shipments, but does not significantly change the factors driving …
Infineon chip adds augmented reality to smartphone
An Infineon chip is used to implement the augmented reality feature in a Lenovo smartphone. Based on the Time-of-Flight principle, the REAL3 image sensor chip from Infineon gives the smartphone a 3-D perception of the surroundings in real-time. Infineon says it is the only image sensor chip to meet Google’s specifications for implementing its Tango …
Fable: The Hubristic Huddle
16 years ago the world’s great electronics companies, like today, didn’t know what to do. So they huddled. Sony, Matsushita, AT&T , Motorola, Philips, Cable & Wireless, Northern Telecom, Toshiba, France Telecom, NTT, Oki, Sanyo, Mitsubishi, Fujitsu all got together to form a company to invent the future. What could go wrong? It worked on …
Android Marshmallow passes 10% for platform share
The latest stats from Google are out, regarding the split of Android platform share. It’s for June 2016, based on active devices interacting with Google Play over the period of a week.
IoT connected clinicians use medical ‘smartphone’
A clinical mobile device that connects hospital staff to a smartphone-like terminal to carry out admissions, specimen collection and medication administration has been developed by Honeywell. The company believes it will create the reality of the IoT “connected clinician” in our hospitals. Sameer Agrawal, director, product marketing, Honeywell Sensing and Productivity Solutions, writes: “We see …
App-based emulators go beyond RTL verification
Application-specific IC design emulators extend their use beyond RTL verification and represents the fourth era in the evolution of emulation, writes Jean-Marie Brunet. In the first era, emulators were used to perform in-circuit emulation (ICE). The purpose was to test a design against real-world stimulus using physical peripherals. For example, by plugging in an Ethernet …
Eight China smartphone vendors in top 12
Eight of the top 12 smartphone companies in Q1 are headquartered in China with an Indian company (Micromax) making the list for the first time, says IC Insights. Gionee, a China-based smartphone supplier, just missed making the 1Q16 top 12 ranking after shipping 4.8 million handsets in the quarter. Seven of the top twelve companies …
AWS CloudFormation Adds Support for Amazon VPC Flow Logs, Amazon Kinesis Firehose Delivery Streams, and Other Updates
AWS CloudFormation has added new resource support. You can now provision the following resources using CloudFormation:
Amazon RDS adds Multi-AZ support for SQL Server in Tokyo, Sydney and Sao Paulo AWS Regions
Amazon RDS now offers Multi-AZ support for Amazon RDS for SQL Server in three new regions – Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney) and South America (Sao Paulo) AWS Regions. This new high availability option leverages SQL Server Mirroring technology with additional improvements to meet the requirements of enterprise-grade production workloads running on SQL Server. The Multi-AZ deployment option provides enhanced availability and data durability by automatically replicating database updates between two AWS Availability Zones. Availability Zones are physically separate locations with independent infrastructure engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones.