5G Sprint Led by Marathon Man
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5G Sprint Led by Marathon Man

　　Wanshi Chen is on the hot seat for 5G.　　The chairman of the 3GPP’s RAN1 committee is tasked with delivering by the end of the year a draft for the next-generation cellular radio. The spec will form the blueprint for silicon needed to make the first standard 5G connection.　　On one side, carriers and their vendors are calling for the specs ASAP so they can test and launch 5G services as early as next year. On the other side, as many as 800 engineers are showing up at meetings of Chen’s group, submitting as many as 3,000 proposals per meeting in hopes of getting a feature in the spec.　　“Some sessions have run as late as 1 a.m., but a typical day is 12 hours,” said Chen, a principal engineer at Qualcomm who was elected chair of RAN1 in August after nine years attending meetings, four of them as a vice chair.　　“We only have two [plenary] meetings to go and tons of stuff to work out. It’s hard to predict how late the meetings will run … I hope we can make it. In the last meeting, people tried to emphasize the sense of urgency.”　　In an effort to increase their chances of finishing on time, engineers agreed at that meeting two weeks ago in Sapporo, Japan, to postpone until June at least 10 features originally in the spec. “I expected more reduction of the scope … it’s not to the level I’d like to see … [the still-large feature set] makes it difficult for me to get things done,” he said.　　(For a full list of proposed and postponed features, find and click on document RP-172108 at this 3GPP page.)　　The idea is to capture in the December draft everything required in hardware. “Anything after December has to be optional … with no hardware impact, but it’s hard to be 100% sure we’ve done the full due diligence … different features have different interest levels from different operators and vendors,” he said. “It’s hard to converge.”　　Given the uncertainty, Verizon and KT (formerly Korea Telecom) launched separate efforts developing their own specs. KT defined in June 2016 its Pyeongchang spec named for the county where it aims to provide 5G-like services during the Winter Olympics in February.　　For its part, Verizon rallied Cisco, Ericsson, Intel, Nokia, Samsung, and others around its 5GTF in late 2015. The spec aims to be the foundation for a last-mile wireless service for consumers that Verizon hopes to switch on next year.　　“We had to have something to test … the 3GPP timing is still suspect,” said Sanyogita Shamsunder, executive director of 5G ecosystem planning at Verizon, in a brief interview on the show floor of the Mobile World Congress Americas earlier this month.　　“We will track [the 3GPP work] and we want to work with the ecosystem, but we don’t want it to be the long pole, so we will continue to develop 5GTF,” she said, noting that she still has an option of using either one as the basis for planned 5G fixed-wireless access services next year.　　Efforts at Verizon and KT helped motivate a consensus earlier this year to accelerate the 3GPP effort. At that time, a majority of stakeholders agreed to move the date for completing the first draft of the radio spec to December 2017, up from June 2018.　　“We think we will see real 5G in mobility in 2019 … a year ago or less, it would have been 2020 or 2021,” said Rick Corker, head of Nokia in North America, one of Verizon’s top vendors.　　Major developers of 5G silicon such as Ericsson, Intel, Nokia, and Qualcomm have all started work on chips. They need the final spec before they can freeze feature sets and start implementing their designs. To date, they have been providing carrier systems using FPGAs for their trials.　　“The amount of pressure to have a spec to let silicon be developed is enormous,” said Michael Murphy, chief technology officer for Nokia North America. “With all the comments and change requests, it’s very, very challenging for the chair to manage.”　　The tight deadline cuts into the time that engineers have to run simulations in the lab between 3GPP meetings, work that sometimes spawns new proposals. “As engineers, we want to get it right,” said John Smee, who works on 5G at Qualcomm Research. “These days, everything is simulated and evaluated.”　　“Just from an engineering perspective, I’d rather have the deadlines more relaxed,” said Chen, who is taking a practical approach to the challenge.　　For example, he asked participants from multiple companies to team up on proposals, hoping to spark strategic compromises. He also started assigning engineers to act as lead representatives for features “to manage and summarize what needs to be addressed and lead offline discussions so online talks can be more focused,” said Chen.　　“Discussions can get out of control. The last meeting was my first as chair, so I provided a lot of my thoughts on how RAN1 should be managed, how online and offline discussions should be carried out, and how contributions should be written.”　　“The key thing is making meetings more efficient and contributions more self-contained with the background needed for good solid proposals,” he added. “People want to hold on to their own proposals, but when it comes to compromise, there’s a good spirit of being flexible.”　　To manage his own stress, Chen tries to start his day with a run of about six miles.　　“I’m a very good runner,” said Chen, who finished the Boston Marathon in three hours and eight minutes back in April, about the time that the 5G schedule was kicked into high gear. “This pressure has cut into my mileage a little, but it’s still an effective way to relieve the stress.”
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Release time：2017-09-29 00:00 reading：1532 Continue reading>>
Samsung, Intel Back Process Control Vendor
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Samsung, Intel Back Process Control Vendor

　　A group of chip companies led by Samsung and Intel have invested $11.2 million in a supplier of semiconductor manufacturing process control systems.　　The series C venture round was led by Samsung Venture Investment Corp., the VC arm of South Korea's Samsung Electronics. Samsung was joined in the funding round by Hitachi High-Tech, sk Hynix and existing investors Intel Capital, Lam Research and MKS Instruments, according to Reno Sub-Systems (Sparks, Nev.).　　Reno Sub-Systems was founded in 2014 by a group of semiconductor industry veterans with backgrounds in the manufacturing equipment and process control space. The company offers two principal technologies —  flow control for gases used in the chip making and RF power generation and matching for impedance matching of electrical loads used in the process.　　According to Chris Davis, a Reno Sub-Systems co-founder and who is also the firm's senior vice president of sales and marketing, Reno Sub-Systems has found willing investors in chip vendors and capital equipment suppliers because the company's technology is "radically better" than what has been used in the semiconductor manufacturing process for decades.　　RF matching networks currently used in the manufacturing process, for example, are based on a vacuum variable capacitor (VVC) technology that was originally patented by Nikola Tesla in 1896, Davis said. Reno Sub-Systems' products are based on an electronically variable capacitor (EVC) matching network technology and can achieve RF matching in a matter of microseconds, dramatically faster than the one to three seconds required for today's state-of-the-art VVC technology, he said.　　"The industry has been asking for improvements in the matching network for many years," Davis said in an interview with EE Times.　　Prior to founding the company, Davis and his co-founders, including Chief Technology Officers Imran Bhutta and Daniel Mudd, approached several chip makers and equipment suppliers to gauge their interest in the technology. Their enthusiast reaction convinced the group that it had technologies that the market was hungry for.　　"We are old enough that we did our own due diligence before we tried to do a startup in this crazy industry," Davis said.　　Reno Sub-Systems has now raised more than $35 million in three rounds of funding from strategic investors, including the venture arms of three of the top five semiconductor vendors and two of the four largest suppliers of etch process tools, as well as a key subsystem supplier — Shanghai's Xipu Hanxin Electronics. Davis said the company plans to use the new funding to support continued development of its technology.　　Investors see the value in Reno Sub-Systems' technology for helping them migrate to more advanced technology nodes through greater precision and process repeatability. While Davis said the company is engaged with customers and potential customers at various levels of the chip making spectrum, the list of backers makes it clear that leading edge chipmakers are the most eager to nurture and secure access to the company's technology.　　"We saw high value in Reno’s technology, so it only made sense for us to pursue an investment," said Dong-Su Kim, vice president of Samsung Venture Investment, in a press statement.
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Release time：2017-09-29 00:00 reading：1698 Continue reading>>
Toshiba Inks Acquisition Deal with Bain-led Group
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Toshiba Inks Acquisition Deal with Bain-led Group

　　Toshiba Corp. said it inked an $18 billion agreement to sell its semiconductor business to the consortium led by private equity firm Bain Capital — a deal structured to proceed even if Toshiba is still engaged in litigation and arbitration with Western Digital Corp. on the matter.　　However, Toshiba added that the sale will not be consummated if the shares of Toshiba Memory Corp., the subsidiary it established to facilitate the sale of the chip business, is blocked by an injunctive order. Western Digital has said it will seek such an order and that a decision could be handed down early next year.　　Western Digital and Toshiba are engaged in litigation in multiple venues and arbitration at the International Chamber of Commerce on the question of whether Toshiba can transfer assets used in the joint ventures between the firms to a third party. Western Digital, which last year acquired SanDisk, Toshiba's longtime partner in NAND flash memory development and manufacturing, maintains that the agreements specify that Toshiba cannot sell the assets without its permission.　　Western Digital said earlier this week that an arbitration request it filed in May seeks an injunction that would require Toshiba to unwind the transfer of its semiconductor assets to Toshiba Memory and prevent Toshiba from selling the assets until the matter is resolved. A ruling on the request for an injunction is not expected until early next year, Western Digital said.　　Western Digital tried for months to hammer out a deal to acquire Toshiba Memory along with partners, but lost out to the Bain-led consortium. Toshiba board members were reportedly concerned about the size of the stake that Western Digital might ultimately hold in Toshiba Memory.　　The legal tussle between Toshiba and Western Digital may jeopardize the longstanding partnership between Toshiba and SanDisk if the sale to the Bain-led group is consummated. But Jim Handy, principal analyst with market research and consulting firm Objective Analysis, believes that a deal would not necessarily spell doom for the partnership.　　"If you pull it apart, the people that approved the consortium's offer, they are Toshiba Corporation, not Toshiba Memory," Handy said. "These are not the people that SanDisk and Western Digital are going to be dealing with. The JV could hold together because their might be a very good relationship between SanDisk and Toshiba Memory."　　But Handy points to something else that may undermine the joint venture and Toshiba Memory. The Nikkei news organization reported last week that the bidding process over Toshiba Memory has paralyzed the unit and caused employees to bolt for competitors including South Korea's Samsung Electronics and sk Hynix.　　"The rank and file Toshiba employees have lost faith in management," Handy said. "Meanwhile you have China's Yangtze River Storage Technology dangling huge incentives at established NAND flash manufacturers to get them to defect. The longer this is unsettled, the more likely it is that there will be people who flee from Toshiba."　　The Bain-led consortium also includes sk Hynix as well as several Japanese and U.S. firms.　　Under the structure of the agreement announced Thursday (Sept. 28), Japanese firms will hold more than 50 percent of the common stock in the new firm — an important consideration for the Japanese government. Toshiba itself will provide about 18 percent of the capital for acquisition and would hold about 40 percent of the shares. Japanese photomask maker Hoya Corp. will provide about 1 percent of the funding but own about 10 percent of the shares, according to the terms of the deal.　　A group of U.S. firms — including Apple, Dell, Seagate Technology and Kingston Technology — would provide about 21 percent of the funding but would not acquire any common stock or voting rights in the firm under the terms of the deal.　　Handy called the structure of the deal — in which Japanese firms get a sizable percentage of the voting rights in exchange for a relatively lower level of investment — "a very Japanese thing to do." But he said that he was surprised that Bain would agree to such a structure.　　"Bain probably wants to find a way to get a quick return," Handy said. "They are probably already lining up someone that is going to acquire their share or they believe the stock price is depressed enough that they will get a quick return."　　Toshiba said sk Hynix would be "firewalled" from accessing proprietary information about Toshiba Memory and would not be permitted to own more than 15 percent of the common stock or voting rights in the venture for a period of 10 years. Hynix will provide about 20 percent of the funding for the acquisition, according to the terms of the deal.　　A special purpose acquisition vehicle known as Pangea, formed and controlled by Bain Capital, intends to finance about 30 percent of the purchase price of Toshiba Memory through obtaining about 600 billion yen (about $5.3 billion) in loans from financial institutions and banks, Toshiba said.　　Innovation Network Corp. of Japan (INCJ) — a public-private partnership between the Japanese government and 19 Japanese corporations — and the state-backed Development Bank of Japan will not initially participate in the acquisition consortium, but "have expressed interest in investing" at a later time, Toshiba said. These organizations have been weary of the legal challenges posed by Western Digital, and Toshiba said last week that they would invest in the venture after the arbitration and litigation is resolved.　　Toshiba said it hopes to close the deal by the end of its fiscal year in March 2018.
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Release time：2017-09-29 00:00 reading：1763 Continue reading>>
Former Freescale CEO Takes Helm at Cree
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Former Freescale CEO Takes Helm at Cree

　　Gregg Lowe, the former leader of Freescale Semiconductor, has been appointed president and CEO of LED maker Cree Inc.　　Lowe will succeed Chuck Swoboda, Cree's top executive for the past 16 years.  Cree announced in May that Swoboda would be stepping down.　　Lowe was also named to Cree's board of director. Robert Ingram, who had served as Cree's lead independent director, was named chairman, succeeding Swoboda, who will remain on the board until the company's annual shareholder meeting on Oct. 24, Cree said.　　Lowe served as Freescale's president and CEO from 2012 to 2015, when the company was acquired by NXP Semiconductors. Lowe previously worked for 28 years at Texas Instruments, rising to the rank of senior vice president and head of the firm's analog business.　　In a statement, Lowe called Cree's "innovation engine" unmatched in the industry. "I am honored to be a part of this team and look forward to working with the employees and the board to establish and execute a clear vision for the company moving forward," he said.　　Lowe currently serves on the board of directors of Silicon Labs, as well as Baylor Healthcare System and the Rock and Roll Hall of Hame.
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Release time：2017-09-28 00:00 reading：4109 Continue reading>>
Partnership Puts ReRAM in SSDs
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Partnership Puts ReRAM in SSDs

　　Solid state drives (SSDs) are pretty much synonymous with NAND flash, but there have been attempts to use a different persistent memory with varying degrees of success.　　Mobiveil Inc. and Crossbar Inc. recently announced they are collaborating to use resistive random access memory (ReRAM) in an SSD. The collaboration will apply Mobiveil's NVMe SSD IP to Crossbar's ReRAM IP blocks. The goal is to enable 10 times more IOPs at one-tenth of the latencies of flash NVME SSDs to speed up access to frequently requested information in large data centers, the companies told EE Times in a joint telephone interview.　　Mobiveil CEO Ravi Thummarukudy said the company's NVMe, PCIe and DDR3/4 controllers can easily be adapted to accommodate the Crossbar ReRAM architecture, which is capable of six-million 512B IOPS below 10us latency. He said Mobiveil's NVM Express Controller architecture is designed to optimize link and throughput utilization, latency, reliability, power consumption and silicon footprint, and can be used along with its PCI Express (PCIe) controller and Crossbar's ReRAM controller.　　Mobiveil's NVMe controller IP is outfitted with an AXI interface that simplifies integration with FPGAs and SoCs. Other IP subsystem components include PCIe Gen 3.0, DDR3/4, and ONFI controllers. An FPGA development platform includes BSPs and drivers for validating the NVMe IP solution against user applications. Crossbar ReRAM technology, meanwhile, can be integrated in standard 40 nm CMOS logic or produced as a standalone memory chip.　　Thummarukudy said there's been a heightened level of interest in persistent memory since Intel and Micron introduced 3D Xpoint. Mobiveil and Crossbar have been working together for the last year, said Sylvain Dubois, vice president of strategic marketing and business development at Crossbar, and in addition to developing IP for ReRAM-based SSDs, they are also working on incorporating ReRAM into NV-DIMMs. “The NV-DIMM is the natural evolution of what we're doing with the SSD," Dubois said.　　The key benefit of using ReRAM in an SSD is that it reduces storage controller complexity by removing large portions of the background memory accesses needed for garbage collection. It also provides independent, atomic erasure by eliminating the need to build large-block memory arrays in flash designs.　　Neither Mobiveil nor Crossbar are building actual SSDs or NV-DIMMs. Rather, they have developed the IP so others can build their own solutions, said Thummarukudy.　　The Mobiveil/Crossbar collaboration is not the first attempt to make SSDs out of something other NAND flash, said Jim Handy, principal analyst at Objective Analysis, including failed attempts to make DRAM-based SSDs. This effort seems similar to Intel's Optane offering, he said. Handy added that Intel and Micron are adamant that Optane doesn't use phase change memory (PCM), considered a subset of ReRAM.　　Intel Optane is the only 3D Xpoint product to date, said Handy, and its chips are similar to that of Crossbar's ReRAM. “The chips themselves are both close to DRAM speeds but persistent," Handy said. "You put them behind an NVMe controller and its ends up being very fast."　　Handy said the biggest disappointment around 3D Xpoint is that Micron and Intel were promoting speeds a thousand times faster than that of NAND flash, but in reality it's only been seven or eight times faster.　　Handy expects Mobiveil and Crossbar's ReRAM-based SSD will suffer the same fate. “What's happening is the NVMe interface becomes a large part of the delay," he said.　　When Intel pushed the NVMe specification, it made sure to put in hooks that would support 3D Xpoint well before the company even announced it had 3D Xpoint. “That was definitely in the back of their minds," Handy said. "They weren't just optimizing an interface for NAND flash."　　Although there are customers who might want to build a ReRAM-based SSD, it's a small market, said Handy. “It's going to be pretty expensive," he added, saying its not dissimilar to the NV-DIMM market.　　“The current NV-DIMMS are more expensive than DRAM, they're way more expensive than SSDs, but offer blazing speed for people who want to pay for it," Handy said.　　Handy said the Crossbar ReRAM-based SSDs will find a niche with customers willing to pay top dollar for persistence and performance, adding that Intel is selling Optane at a loss because it helps the company sell more expensive processors.　　SSDs with 3D NAND are not in any danger, said Handy. “They will be far more economical than anything made of out Crossbar ReRAM," he said.
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Release time：2017-09-28 00:00 reading：1659 Continue reading>>
Qualcomm Extends Offer for NXP
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Qualcomm Extends Offer for NXP

　　Qualcomm extended its tender offer for all outstanding shares of NXP Semiconductors as it continues to work toward obtaining regulatory approval of the $38 billion deal.　　There is increasing speculation that Qualcomm may have to increase its offer to acquire NXP given that NXP's stock price has risen significantly since the deal was announced in October 2016. The deal was originally supposed to close by Oct. 27 of this year.　　Qualcomm said its new tender offer expires Oct. 20. The company said about 3 percent of NXP's shares have already been tendered.　　The deal is still awaiting approval by European regulators. The European Commission put its investigation of the acquisition on hold in for a second time earlier this month pending submission of relevant documents from the firms.　　Analysts generally believe that the deal will be approved given the complementary product offerings of the two firms. However, if the deal fails to obtain regulatory approval, Qualcomm may be on the hook for a $2 billion "breakup fee" to NXP.
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Release time：2017-09-27 00:00 reading：1442 Continue reading>>
Intel Refreshes Desktop CPUs
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Intel Refreshes Desktop CPUs

　　Intel refreshed its line of desktop PC processors with six chips made in its 14-nm++ process. Reviewers said that the eighth-generation Intel Core CPUs nudge the x86 giant ahead of rival Advanced Micro Devices despite their lack of significant changes in architecture or process technology.　　The so-called Coffee Lake chips arrive seven months after AMD started shipping its most competitive new line of PC processors in years. Although the PC market has generally been in decline over the last several years, PC sales have been on the rebound recently.　　A new high-end desktop product, the Intel Core i7-8700K, runs at up to 4.7 GHz, the highest frequency ever for the company. Separately, Intel packed six and four cores in its mid-range and low-end parts that used to sport four and two cores, respectively. However, the low-end CPU no longer supports dual threading.　　Overall, “clock speeds don't change much, and in fact, base clock speeds dropped in some cases,” said Kevin Krewell, analyst with Tirias Research. “Single-threaded applications can see small performance increases when the boosted clocking is engaged … [and] the extra cores will help threaded applications perform better.”　　The new chips will be available starting October 5. Systems using them will ship before the end of the year.　　Observers expect a more significant milestone next year when Intel is expected to start shipping its first PC chips code-named Cannon Lake using its 10-nm process. Meanwhile, Globalfoundries revealed last week that it is working with AMD on a 12-nm node, likely for a refresh of AMD’s Zen-based chips in 2018.
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Release time：2017-09-27 00:00 reading：1625 Continue reading>>
Western Digital Still Hopes to Block Toshiba Chip Sale
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Western Digital Still Hopes to Block Toshiba Chip Sale

　　Toshiba may have settled on a bid from a consortium led by private equity firm Bain Capital for its semiconductor business, but the owner of its longtime partner in NAND flash development is still working to prevent the sale.　　After trying for months to hammer out a deal to acquire Toshiba's semiconductor business, Western Digital now appears to be pinning its hopes on a legal strategy that includes three separate arbitration cases and may take two years or more to resolve.　　Western Digital has initiated three arbitrations against Toshiba in the matter, most recently last week when it ask the International Chamber of Commerce arbitration court to block Toshiba Memory from going to alone in investing for new equipment for NAND fabs. Toshiba had said it would invest unilaterally in equipment for a new NAND fab at its Yokkaichi operations site, shutting out Western Digital's SanDisk subsidiary, Toshiba's partner in NAND flash development and manufacturing for the past 17 years.　　An earlier request for arbitration, filed in May, seeks an injunction that would require Toshiba to unwind the transfer of its semiconductor assets to Toshiba Memory Corp., a subsidiary set up for the purpose of being spun out through a sale. That arbitration request also seeks a ruling preventing Toshiba from transferring assets of the joint venture between the two companies without Western Digital's consent and interim injunctive relief presumably in the form of preventing sale of Toshiba Memory until the matter is resolved. A ruling on the request for injunctive relief is not expected until early next year, Western Digital said.　　Western Digital said the arbitrations — each of which will be decided by a three-member panel — are proceeding. The companies have agreed to some of the arbitrators that will sit on the panels, Western Digital said.　　There is still no timetable for when the arbitration tribunals will actually begin, and Western Digital said rulings in the cases may take 24 months or more.　　The legal maneuvers by Western Digital may well put a kink in the works of Toshiba's plans to sell its chip unit to the Bain group, which also includes South Korean memory chip vendor sk Hynix, Apple, Dell and Japanese government-backed organizations Innovation Network Corp. of Japan (INCJ) and the Development Bank of Japan.　　An earlier effort by the same group to acquire Toshiba Memory stalled, reportedly because both INCJ and the Development Bank of Japan wanted Western Digital's legal challenges to be resolved prior to finalizing a deal. The new deal, announced last week,calls for these organizations to participate in funding the acquisition only after the Western Digital challenges are resolved. Toshiba said the deal is based on the premise that the sale would move forward even if courts impose an injunction against Toshiba.　　A California court ordered in July that Toshiba must provide Western Digital with at least 14 days of notice prior to close the sale. The court also ruled in August that Toshiba could not prevent SanDisk employees from accessing databases containing relevant manufacturing information about the JVs.　　The Reuters news service reported Tuesday that the deal with the Bain-led group is still unsigned because Apple had yet to agree to terms.　　Toshiba has been looking to sell its semiconductor business since early this year to offset huge losses incurred by its U.S. nuclear power business. The company has held negotiations with several groups, including one led by Western Digital and another led by Taiwanese contract manufacturing giant Foxconn. Toshiba announced in June that the Bain-led group was its preferred bidder, but the deal stalled over the Western Digital challenges.　　In a statement issued Tuesday (Sept. 26), John Hueston, counsel for Western Digital and a partner at Hueston Hennigan LLP, repeated Western Digital's assertion that the joint venture agreements between SanDisk and Toshiba explicitly prohibit the sale of each company's relevant assets without the consent of the other. He said Western Digital remains confident it will succeed in the arbitration process.　　"Absent any willingness on Toshiba's part to resolve this matter with its JV partner in a constructive manner, we intend to continue our successful legal efforts into the binding arbitration," Hueston said.
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Release time：2017-09-27 00:00 reading：3675 Continue reading>>
IPhone 8 Chips Come into View
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IPhone 8 Chips Come into View

　　Apple shrunk the applications processor in its iPhone 8 Plus by 30 percent while adding two CPU cores and a machine-learning block, according to the first public teardown of the chip. TechInsights reported details of the SoC as well as camera and modem chips in the handset as part of a chip teardown still in progress.　　The A11 Bionic AP sports a die size of 89.23 mm2, a 30 percent shrink compared to the A10 chip. While the CPU1 block hewed to the average overall shrink, the GPU and SDRAM blocks shrunk by 40 percent each, a TechInsights representative told EE Times.　　The CPU2 block on the A11 is larger than the same block on the A10, mainly because Apple doubled its core count to four. The GPU is still a six-core block. The blocks take up similar locations and space on both chips with the CPUs at about 15 percent of total area, GPUs at 20 percent and the SDRAM interfaces at 8 percent.　　TechInsights has not investigated the so-called neural engine on the chip. In addition, it has yet to confirm reports it uses the same 10nm TSMC process as the A10X in the iPad Pro 10.5.　　The A11 is a package-on-package device believed to use the same TSMC InFo-PoP process as the A10. In one iPhone 8 Plus TechInsights tore down, the SoC was packaged with the Micron MT53D384M64D4NY 3GByte mobile LPDDR4 SDRAM. In a second handset teardown, the memory chip appeared to come from Samsung.　　The handset included a 32.8 mm2 Sony image sensor, slightly larger than the 32.3 mm2 chip in the iPhone 7. It delivers a 1.22 ?m pixel pitch.　　“The big news is the absence of surface artifacts corresponding to the through silicon via arrays we’ve seen for a few years. A superficial review of the die photo would suggest it’s a regular back-illuminated chip. However, we’ve confirmed it’s a stacked (Exmor RS) chip, which means hybrid bonding is in use for the first time in an Apple camera,” TechInsights said.　　Apple used Intel’s XMM7480 LTE baseband processor in the handsets. It bore a X2748 B11 die marking.
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Release time：2017-09-27 00:00 reading：2264 Continue reading>>
Sondrel’s CEO Takes the Long View
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Sondrel’s CEO Takes the Long View

　　A recent uptick in merger, acquisition, and expansion activity among Europe’s chip-design and -development providers could signal that the sector is rebounding after several difficult years. Two examples this summer were Leti’s launch of an emulator service for European chip makers and a pair of moves by Sondrel IC Design Services that will aggressively expand its engineering head count.　　Late last month, Sondrel (Reading, U.K.) said it would hire 100 electronics engineers in Europe over the next three years, at an investment of ?10 million ($ 13.5 million). The announcement came on the heels of Sondrel’s acquisition of Imagination Technologies’ IMGWorks SoC design and software integration services team. The acquisition brought Sondrel’s IC design group engineering head count to more than 250.　　EE Times recently caught up with Sondrel founder and CEO Graham Curren, who started Sondrel as a privately financed and independent IC services company in 2002. The affable technologist shared his views on topics ranging from the benefits of market-driver diversity to the competitive pros and cons of China’s market growth and the possible ramifications of Brexit.　　Bubble-proof?　　Curren is bullish on Europe’s silicon-device-manufacturing market and Sondrel’s role in it, following some admittedly difficult years for the company and the European industry at large. A migration of design services activity into Asia has affected manufacturing as well as systems companies, and the three big semiconductor companies of 10 years ago have all undergone difficult transitions. But Curren now sees positive signs for startups and investment.　　“The most encouraging thing to me, I think, is that the drivers right now are not limited to one segment,” Curren said. “After 2000, we had the Internet bubble, and then we had a burst of activity in the mobile space, so right now there’s a whole bunch of different application driving growth. From cars to artificial intelligence to video processing and transmission, [there is] a whole range of different things all happening at once, and I haven’t seen that for a long time.　　“It’s very good to see,” Curren added. “It makes me feel that the industry growth is much less likely to peak in the near term. [The industry is] much less susceptible to a bubble because it’s got those multiple drivers, and they’re all relatively early in their growth curve. I am very positive about the next few years.”　　One of those drivers is the video game industry, which has become a surprising target of governmental focus here in Germany. German Chancellor Angela Merkel even addressed the crowd at the opening of a recent video game conference in Cologne, where she stressed the importance of the video game sector to the country’s industrial base. You never would have heard such a speech from a characteristically conservative government a decade ago.　　Curren acknowledged that “in the area of video games there is a lot going on; there’s a lot of interest,” but he added a word of caution for Germany. “I guess I’m a little bit concerned about people jumping on bandwagons. That tends to be what screws things up in the end,” he said. “But there’s some very good, solid foundations around at the moment, areas they excel in — automotive being one of the biggest ones, where the business that’s driving it is really quite long term, and that’s good. Industries like that aren’t going to be overcome by investors jumping in and trying to make a mark. It’s a much more stable, long-term industry … There’s an extremely long tail with automotive, and it’s not susceptible to short product lifetimes.”　　Barriers to homegrown hires　　The foundry market is now a worldwide business, with new competition from some of the growing economies in Asia and a rise in entrepreneurial activity. In this flat-Earth manufacturing environment, one of the biggest risks to European industry is the lack of focus on engineering training and the resultant dearth of new engineers entering the job market. Most of the engineers Sondrel has hired in Europe over the past few years have been immigrants. Any tightening of immigration rules as a result of Brexit and other factors could limit European companies’ ability to in bring in qualified people, Curren said.　　“If I look at the people within Sondrel, the vast majority are over the age of 40, and yet if I look at our office in India or our office in China … almost everybody is under the age of 40, so the demographic is hugely different,” said Curren. “Of course, move on 20 years, and it’s pretty obvious where that’s going to go. That’s my biggest concern, at least in the semiconductor industry, but I think in engineering in general.”　　Sondrel might have gotten “a lot of attention” of late, Curren added, “but the growth in the company hasn’t suddenly just taken off. We’ve grown at 25 percent to 30 percent per annum for 15 years, on average … Our strategy is very much to continue to grow, but we are a global company. We have half our workforce outside of Europe, and we will continue to grow in all of the different areas. Our competitors are mostly from India. We can’t compete directly on a cost base with a cost-driven company.　　“If we could hire more graduates and junior-level engineers in Europe, we would do that. The last time we did a hiring round from the university, we ended up, purely through competitive selection, finding what we considered to be the best candidates, [and] all three of them were Chinese. They couldn’t get visas to work in the U.K. at the time, and therefore we sent them all to work in our Shanghai office. That was not great. That wasn’t the intention. But that is going to be the result not only for us, but for other companies who will have to export the work.” In a dynamic worldwide market, moves like Sondrel’s, taken with an eye on the long view, can help a company maintain its intellectual property within the organization. Indeed, in the current environment it is arguable whether a company’s base is where its corporate headquarters are or where its IP is.　　The long view works for entire markets as well as individual companies. China’s chip design and manufacturing services sector is a case in point. “We’ve got all sorts of different opinions about China, but one thing you can say for sure is that they’ve outgrown any of their competitors in the world by a very long margin over the last 10- or 20-plus years, and part of that is a willingness to take long-term views,” Curren said. “If you have quarterly reports and quarterly shareholders, and very, very short-term considerations, you’re quite hampered in your ability to do that.”　　Sondrel isn’t a public company, Curren noted, but it does “require banks,” and among its greatest challenges is “trying to explain to a bank why you’re running a business in a particular way. It’s impossible, because they just don’t understand it, and they’re not interested.” The emphasis on “producing things in a way that fits the box the banks like and technology doesn’t” hampers a company’s ability to plan for long-term growth, he said.　　“I think we need to run our businesses as businesses,” Curren said. “If we want to build a long-term strong business, we need to look at the long-term goals. At the moment, there are a lot of startups that tend to be run, understandably, as short term: put a lot of money into it, [make] short term gains, exit out in a couple of years. That doesn’t work with a big company, though. If we’re going to get some big or medium-sized companies coming out, then [we need] we need more focus on pure business profitability and cash flow.”　　As companies plan for the long haul, the Sondrel CEO added, “anyone who isn’t looking at China is making a bad mistake. China is both an opportunity and a threat. There is a huge amount going on in China, and I think anybody should look at it. Whether they want to go into that market or whether they just want to defend against it, they need to know what’s going on … The amount of money and new ideas and the speed of work [in China] are going to catch people out, so let’s make sure that we’re watching that. It can be good and it can also be bad.”　　On Brexit　　Brexit is another issue for the chip engineering and manufacturing segments both within and outside the United Kingdom. For Sondrel, Curren said, “one issue is the restrictions on the movement of people; we need to move people around. As I said, a lot of our internal growth, in the U.K. in particular, has been from bringing people into the country. … As to whether or not you want to have more people in the country, we’ll leave that to the politicians and the public. But if we can’t bring people in, then there is only one outcome, which is that the work’s going to go outside. We can cope with that as a company — that’s fine — but that’s one decision that has to be made. It’ll be a pain in the neck if we have to get visas every time we want to go to France and Germany, but we’ll see what happens.” Curren is not concerned that Brexit-related import/export restrictions will affect Sondrel’s business. “If the economy took a downturn again, I’m not too concerned, as ours is an international business; it’s mostly international customers with international revenue themselves,” he said.　　“I’m a big believer that businesses and economies and people will thrive regardless of how much the politicians try to screw things up,” Curren added. “They seem to be quite intent on scoring public points against each other, rather than just getting on with what makes any sense in the moment. It’s like having children, sometimes, isn’t it?”
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