At this week’s 2018 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, imec presented considerable progress in enabling germanium nanowire pFET devices as a practical solution to extend scaling beyond the 5nm node. In a first paper, the research center unveiled an in-depth study of the electrical properties of strained germanium nanowire pFETs...

According to TrendForce’s latest report, the premium smartphone market experienced weak demand in 1H18, as the vendors blurred the lines between their mid-range and premium models, and the new devices released did not trigger a high level of replacement demand as anticipated...

According to IC Insights, overall, the capital spending story for 2018 is becoming much more positive. In the March Update, IC Insights forecast an 8% increase in semiconductor industry capital spending for this year. However, as shown in Figure, IC Insights has raised its expectations for 2018 capital spending by six percentage points to a 14% increase...

The top-15 worldwide semiconductor (IC and O-S-D—optoelectronic, sensor, and discrete) sales ranking for 1Q18 is shown in Figure. It includes eight suppliers headquartered in the U.S., three in Europe, two in South Korea, and one each in Taiwan and Japan...

The spread of digital camera applications in vehicles, machine vision, human recognition and security systems, as well as for more powerful camera phones will drive CMOS image sensor sales to an eighth straight record-high level this year with worldwide revenues growing 10% to $13...

The TSIA survey showed that Q1 2018 Taiwan IC revenue as a whole (including design, manufacturing, packaging and testing) totaled NT$603.2 billion(US$19.8B) (10.7% decline on-quarter and up 5.6% on-year), with NT$137.2 billion in design(US$4...

Synopsys announced its collaboration with TSMC to develop DesignWare Foundation IP for TSMC's 22-nanometer (nm) ultra-low power (ULP) and ultra-low leakage (ULL) processes. DesignWare Foundation IP, including logic libraries, embedded memories...