FTC opposes Nvidia-Arm deal; Mobileye to go public; Renesas enters the FPGA market; Toshiba to split in three; acquisition updates

Catching up on some of the news from the last thirty days or so, let’s start with some market data: according to market research firm Omdia, in the third quarter of 2021 the semiconductor market surpassed $150 billion and Samsung Electronics overtook Intel as number one semiconductor firm in the revenue ranking, on the strength of its memory business. Moving to some fab updates, Samsung has officially confirmed it would build a new semiconductor manufacturing facility in Taylor, Texas, with an estimated $17 billion investment. TSMC, for its part, will build a specialty technology fab in Kumamoto, Japan, with Sony Semiconductor Solutions participating as a minority shareholder.

Credit: Omdia

FTC sues to block Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm

As widely reported by many media outlets, the United States’ Federal Trade Commission filed a law enforcement action to block Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm, “to preserve competition in markets for computer chips used in datacenters and in automotive advanced driver assistance systems.” The administrative trial is scheduled to begin on August 9, 2022. The FTC’s position about the “anticompetitive effects” of the proposed acquisition is described in detail in this twenty-four-page document.

Intel to take Mobileye public

Intel has announced its intention to take Mobileye public in the United States in mid-2022 via an initial public offering (IPO) of newly issued Mobileye stock. Intel will remain the majority owner of Mobileye, the Israel-based ADAS specialist company it acquired in 2017. After the IPO, the Mobileye executive team will remain, with Prof. Amnon Shashua continuing as the company’s CEO. Recently acquired Moovit as well as Intel teams working on lidar and radar development and other Mobileye projects will be aligned as part of Mobileye. The announcement underlines that “Intel’s acquisition of Mobileye has been a great success,” and that “Intel has no intention of spinning off or otherwise divesting its majority ownership interest.”

Amnon Shashua, CEO of Mobileye. Credit: Intel

Renesas enters the low-cost, low-power FPGA market

Projected price in volume “well under US$ 0.50”, projected standby power for the first devices “less than 20 microamps”, free development software: these are some of the key features of the new FPGAs from Renesas. Called ForgeFPGA, the new family will serve applications that require less than 5,000 gates of logic, with initial device sizes of 1K and 2K Look Up Tables. According to Renesas, these features will open up applications that previously couldn’t use FPGAs due to cost constraints, including high-volume consumer and IoT applications. The free development software offers two modes to accommodate both new and experienced FPGA developers: a “macrocell mode” that uses a schematic capture-based development flow, and an “HDL” mode that provides a familiar Verilog environment for FPGA veterans. The Renesas team that developed the ForgeFPGA family is the same group of people that introduced the GreenPAK programmable mixed-signal devices at Silego Technology, which came into the Renesas portfolio as part of the recently completed Dialog Semiconductor acquisition.

Toshiba to split in three

Toshiba has announced its intention to separate into three standalone companies. The three new entities are an Infrastructure Service company (power generation, transmission and distribution; renewable energy; energy management; systems solutions for public infrastructure, railways and industry; building energy-saving solutions; IT solutions for government agencies and private companies); a Device company (power semiconductors, optical semiconductors, analog integrated circuits, high-capacity hard disk drives for data centers, semiconductor manufacturing equipment); and a third Toshiba company, holding its shares in memory manufacturer Kioxia and Toshiba Tec Corporation. As part of this strategic reorganization, “Toshiba will seek to convert the shares of Kioxia Holdings Corporation into cash as soon as practicable.”

Samsung’s new 2.5D packaging technology

Samsung Electronics has developed a new 2.5D packaging solution suited to high-performance devices that need to integrate a large number of silicon dies. Called “Hybrid-Substrate Cube (H-Cube)” technology, the solution has been jointly developed with Samsung Electro-mechanics (SEMCO) and Amkor Technology. According to Samsung, when integrating six or more HBMs, the difficulty in manufacturing the large area substrate increases rapidly. Samsung addressed this problem by applying a hybrid structure overlapping a high-density interconnect substrate – that is easy to implement in large area – and a high-end fine-pitch substrate.

H-CubeTM Package Structure Concept (Graphic: Business Wire)

Risc-V-based smartphones, Windows apps on Snapdragon-based PCs

A couple of updates about alternative processing platforms, Risc-V instead of Arm for running Android, and Snapdragon instead of x86 for running Windows. According to a press report, Chinese company Sipeed could launch a Risc-V-based smartphone running Android 10 in 2022. Meanwhile, Qualcomm is boosting support for app developers targeting Windows on Snapdragon-based laptop PCs.

Acquisitions and other deals

Qorvo, a provider of RF solutions, has acquired UnitedSiC (Princeton, New Jersey), a manufacturer of silicon carbide power semiconductors. Besides RF solutions, Qorvo already had a Programmable Power Management product line.

Intel has reportedly recruited the design team of Centaur Technology, which has now “reached the end of the trail” according to analysis firm The Linley Group. Centaur is owned by Via Technologies, which still retains its intellectual property including its recent CHA design, but The Linley Group does not expect the company to market that server processor without an engineering team to support it.

Lattice has acquired Mirametrix (Montreal, Canada), a software company focused on AI computer vision applications, with the goal of creating an end-to-end solution that spans from the hardware to the application layer.

Qualcomm has acquired Clay AIR (Los Angeles, CA), developer of an AI-powered hand tracking and gesture recognition technology.

Foxconn Interconnect Technology, a subsidiary of Foxconn, has invested $10 million in Autotalks, a V2X chipset vendor. V2X (Vehicle to Everything) allows direct communication between vehicles and all other road users, without using the cellular network.

Infineon has acquired Malaysian company Syntronixs Asia. The company specializes in precision electroplating, a key process in the assembly process of semiconductors.

French company Soitec, a Silicon-on-Insulator specialist, has acquired NovaSiC (Grenoble. France), a company specialized in polishing and reclaiming wafers on silicon carbide. With this move, Soitec is expanding its product portfolio beyond Silicon on Insulator and prepares the industrialization of SmartSiC substrates, resulting from the application of Soitec’s SmartCut technology to SiC.

Toronto-based Alphawave IP, a provider of high-speed connectivity IP, has acquired Precise-ITC, a Canadian Ethernet and Optical Transport Network (OTN) communications connectivity IP vendor. The two companies have been partnering sing 2019.

Molex has acquired core technology and intellectual property from Keyssa (Campbell, CA), a developer of high-speed contactless connectors for chip-to-chip communication. Keyssa technology targets communications within the mobile device, such as from the display, camera and other key modules, replacing physical cables or connectors with a wireless link that operates at data rates up to 6 Gbps on the 60 GHz band with no WiFi or Bluetooth interference.

Events

NeurIPS 2021, thirty-fifth conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, is running as a virtual-only event until December 14.

IEDM, IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, will be held as an in-person conference December 11-15 in San Francisco.

SemIsrael Expo 2021, scheduled for December 13, has been postponed due to Covid-19 restrictions. New date will be soon published, says the event website.

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