Author Archives: david manners

Handset sales growing at 2.4% CAGR through 2020, says Ovum

Handset sales are expected to grow from 1.88 billion to 2.16 billion units between 2014 and 2020, at a CAGR of 2.4%.

Smartphones will comprise 95% of global handset sales by 2020, up from 65% in 2014, and will first exceed 2 billion unit sales in 2020.

“The fact that almost all handsets to be sold in 2020 will be smartphones will lead to great socioeconomic achievements across the world in the next five years,” says Ovum’s Ronan de Renesse.

Android and iOS devices will continue to lead the market with 80% and 14% smartphone volume market share respectively in 2020, almost identical to 2014.

Handsets based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS will capture most of the remaining market with a 4.2% market share in 2020, equivalent to 86 million unit sales.

Africa and the Middle East and Latin America will lead the smartphone market in terms of growth over the next six years with a CAGR of 17% and 11% respectively, reaching a combined 576 million units sales by 2020, up from 254 million in 2014.

In Asia Pacific, the Chinese market is reaching saturation with an expected CAGR of only 4.1% in the next six years, versus 19.7% for India and 16.3% for Indonesia.

North America and Western Europe will be trailing behind with a CAGR of only 2% in the next six years.

Most of the growth in the smartphone market will come from the sale of sub-$100 devices in developing as well as developed countries.

This price tier will represent more than 40% of global smartphone sales by 2020, up from 13% in 2014.

Ovum’s study revealed a steep decline in smartphone prices: between 4Q13 and 4Q14, the median price of prepaid and SIM-free smartphones (representing 56% of all operator offers worldwide) decreased 28%, from $360 to $258.

This decline is largely attributed to a structural shift toward lower-end smartphone models rather than price decreases in particular segments. With 40+ manufacturers recorded via this study, the low-end smartphone segment is also the most diverse and competitive.

M2COMM to drive new Weightless SIG standard

M²Communication (M2COMM) has joined the Weightless SIG to lead a Weightless Working Group for the development of an LPWAN Standard.

The standard, called Weightless-P, will offer uplink and downlink capabilities to significantly enhance quality of service especially important in the industrial IoT sector.

Adapted from field-proven experiences, Weightless-P supports all major license-exempt SRD/ISM bands including 169, 433, 470 – 510, 780, 868, 915 and 923MHz, ensuring worldwide availability.

The Standard provides fully acknowledged 2-way communication offering best in class quality of service at data rates ranging from 200bps to 100kbps. It enables higher capacity than existing LPWAN and cellular technologies for uplink-dominated traffic with short-to-medium payload sizes.

Using common commercially-available chipsets it will also support both stationary and mobile end devices by utilising low-power, innovative handover, cell re-selection and roaming methods. Other advanced reliability features include fast network acquisition, paging, FEC, ARQ, power control and adaptive channel coding.

The range and reliability, from challenging dense urban to rural environments, will exceed alternative LPWAN technologies using up to 17dBm output power.

Whilst offering the promised performance, network reliability and security characteristics of 3GPP carrier-grade solutions, still unavailable for some considerable time, Weightless-P promises substantially lower costs and power consumption, <100uW in idle state compared to more than 3mW for the best cellular technologies and a price point equivalent to existing LPWAN solutions.

“Weightless-P will breathe new life into an IoT market that is waiting on a reliable LPWAN technology,” says M2COMM CEO Derrick Wei, “many IoT sectors require reliability to be addressed with ultra-low energy wireless communications not accessible through operator services today. The slow adoption of wireless IoT solutions highlights a huge technology void that Weightless-P will address without requiring custom hardware”.

The Weightless-P Specification is expected to be published and available to SIG Members in Q4 2015. Weightless-P hardware, including development kits, is expected to be launched early 2016.

M2COMM to drive new Weightless SIG standard

M²Communication (M2COMM) has joined the Weightless SIG to lead a Weightless Working Group for the development of an LPWAN Standard.

The standard, called Weightless-P, will offer uplink and downlink capabilities to significantly enhance quality of service especially important in the industrial IoT sector.

Adapted from field-proven experiences, Weightless-P supports all major license-exempt SRD/ISM bands including 169, 433, 470 – 510, 780, 868, 915 and 923MHz, ensuring worldwide availability.

The Standard provides fully acknowledged 2-way communication offering best in class quality of service at data rates ranging from 200bps to 100kbps. It enables higher capacity than existing LPWAN and cellular technologies for uplink-dominated traffic with short-to-medium payload sizes.

Using common commercially-available chipsets it will also support both stationary and mobile end devices by utilising low-power, innovative handover, cell re-selection and roaming methods. Other advanced reliability features include fast network acquisition, paging, FEC, ARQ, power control and adaptive channel coding.

The range and reliability, from challenging dense urban to rural environments, will exceed alternative LPWAN technologies using up to 17dBm output power.

Whilst offering the promised performance, network reliability and security characteristics of 3GPP carrier-grade solutions, still unavailable for some considerable time, Weightless-P promises substantially lower costs and power consumption, <100uW in idle state compared to more than 3mW for the best cellular technologies and a price point equivalent to existing LPWAN solutions.

“Weightless-P will breathe new life into an IoT market that is waiting on a reliable LPWAN technology,” says M2COMM CEO Derrick Wei, “many IoT sectors require reliability to be addressed with ultra-low energy wireless communications not accessible through operator services today. The slow adoption of wireless IoT solutions highlights a huge technology void that Weightless-P will address without requiring custom hardware”.

The Weightless-P Specification is expected to be published and available to SIG Members in Q4 2015. Weightless-P hardware, including development kits, is expected to be launched early 2016.

Toshiba clear-out following scandal

Toshiba CEO Hisao Tanaka, vice chairman and former CEO Norio Sasaki and company adviser and former CEO Atsutoshi Nishida have all resigned as of today following seven years of false accounting initiated under Nishida.

Nishida was CEO from 2005-9, and Sasaki was CEO from 2009 to 2013 when Tanska took over.

The chairman, Masashi Muromachi, is to take the CEO job pro tem.

An investigating panel said that profits were overstated by $1.2 billion over the seven years.

The panel also said that under the three CEOs a culture of intimidation stopped employees from protesting against unrealistic profit targets while execs were continually hassled by emails pushing for earnings increases.

Toshiba clear-out following scandal

Toshiba CEO Hisao Tanaka, vice chairman and former CEO Norio Sasaki and company adviser and former CEO Atsutoshi Nishida have all resigned as of today following seven years of false accounting initiated under Nishida.

Nishida was CEO from 2005-9, and Sasaki was CEO from 2009 to 2013 when Tanska took over.

The chairman, Masashi Muromachi, is to take the CEO job pro tem.

An investigating panel said that profits were overstated by $1.2 billion over the seven years.

The panel also said that under the three CEOs a culture of intimidation stopped employees from protesting against unrealistic profit targets while execs were continually hassled by emails pushing for earnings increases.

Cadence and UltraSoC debug IP for Xtensa

UltraSoC CEO - Rupert Baines

UltraSoC CEO – Rupert Baines

UltraSoC and Cadence are supporting the Tensilica Xtensa family of processors within UltraSoC’s UltraDebug universal SoC debug solution. The IP will be available for integration and tapeout in early Q3 2015.

Xtensa technology enables the system architect to create power-efficient, high-performance processors and DSPs customized to the exact needs of their design. This, in turn, allows the creation of SoCs in which key tasks are offloaded from the host processor to multiple heterogeneous Xtensa processors.

“Xtensa processors are a proven route to efficient, high-performance SoCs,” says UltraSoC CEO Rupert Baines, “today’s application processors are not optimized to handle the vast range of tasks required in today’s advanced consumer products – in particular datapath processing. Xtensa technology provides a solution to that problem, offloading tasks from the host processor and creating highly optimized multicore SoCs. We’re very much in tune with this vision of the SoC, and delighted to be working with an industry-leader like Cadence to make it happen.”

UltraDebug is designed to speed pre- and post-silicon debugging in exactly these environments, allowing the designer to “bake in” an on-chip debug infrastructure that is tailored to the specific requirements of their system design. It enables holistic debugging of system software running on chips that incorporate multiple, heterogeneous functional units, as well as custom logic designed in-house.
Xtensa processors are the latest CPU family to be supported within UltraDebug, which already includes direct support for other common processor cores.

“UltraSoC has innovative technology when it comes to SoC debug,” says Cadence’s Chris Jones, “their technology helps designers to create competitive products quickly and we’re looking forward to working together to solve the SoC debug challenge, which we believe is one of the challenges facing the semiconductor industry today.”

StrongIRFE MOSFETs from Infineon

Infineon has launched a family of StrongIRFE MOSFETs for DC powered circuits including battery powered circuits, brushed and brushless DC (BDLC) motor drives.

The MOSFETs can bring highest energy efficiency to end-applications such as power and gardening tools, light electric vehicles, drones and e-bikes that demand a high level of energy efficiency but are restricted in available space. This is made possible by the compact Medium Can DirectFET housing featuring a new layout.

“The reliability and performance of DirectFET packaging technology is further enhanced with a new layout that now offers even lower thermal resistance. Combined with rugged silicon, these new StrongIRFET DirectFET MOSFETsoffer improvements in overall system-level size, efficiency and cost making them well suited to all space constrained application,” says Infineon’s Stephane Ernoux

The StrongIRFET devices are housed in a Medium Can DirectFET package that features dual-sided cooling to deliver high power density and excellent thermal performance. By re-locating the gate pad to the corner of the die on these latest devices, the new layout significantly increases the source contact area to achieve even lower thermal resistance to the PCB than standard DirectFETpackages, further improving efficiency, and increasing the scalability of design.

The new devices, which range from 40 V to 75 V, feature the characteristics of the StrongIRFET family, including low on-state resistance (R DS(on)) to minimize conduction losses , high current carrying capability and rugged silicon to improve system reliability. The product family features an environmentally-friendly 100 percent lead-free package that iscurrent and future ROHS compliant.

Plessey ride for Prostate Cancer UK

The annual Plessey Semiconductors charity ride

The annual Plessey Semiconductors charity ride

Plessey Semiconductors will host its annual, corporate hospitality and charity ride on Thursday 3rd of September 2015, to raise funds for Prostate Cancer UK. The picture shows the Plessey cycle team.

The funds raised will help to provide support and information to men and their families, fund research into the causes and treatments of the disease, and campaign to give men’s health the prominence it needs to influence others.

Mark Bishop, Director of Fundraising at Prostate Cancer UK, said, “By raising funds, Plessey is joining Men United and helping more men survive prostate cancer and enjoy a better quality of life. We thank all involved and wish them every success with their challenge.”

The 105 mile ride will be based on the 2014 stage five of Tour of Britain where the cyclists will follow a modified version of the route with scheduled stops along the way.

The team will start and complete nearby the Plessey facilities in Plymouth on the edge of Dartmoor National Park in South Devon, and stop for breaks and refreshments along the route in Okehampton, Exeter, Bovey Tracy and Widecombe-in-the-Moor.

The cycling specialists Evans Cycles will be providing a service station to perform safety checks for all the company employees and corporate clients participating in the event.

TSMC reports slowing comms wafer orders

TSMC saw revenues shrink 7.5% in Q2 compared to Q1 but says it still expects 2.2% sequential growth in Q3 and double-digit growth for the full year, reports Digitimes.

It expects Q3 revenues to be around $6.7billion.

However it expects the overall semiconductor to grow only 3% and the foundry industry to grow 6%.

“The end market recovery is not as strong as was expected earlier; customers continue to remain cautious in inventory management. Combining these factors with customers’ product transition, demand for TSMC wafers in the third quarter is expected to recover only modestly,” TSMC CFO Lora Ho told the company’s investor day meeting.

Affecting the market is a deceleration in smartphone growth and excess inventory at the manufacturers. 62% of TSMC’s revenues come from comms applications ICs.

Mark Liu, TSMC President and Co-CEO, said:

“Thanks to our strong leadership in advanced technologies, TSMC has been able to gain foundry market segment shares in recent years. This year our market share will again be well-supported by the expansion of our advanced notes, namely 16 nanometer, 20 nanometer and 28 nanometer.”

“For 16 nanometer, we are starting our volume shipment as we speak. The ramping of our 16 nanometer will be very steep, even steeper than our 20 nanometer. Ramping profile, similar ramping profile at similar early stage.”

“Looking out to the future, with many more customers joining our 16 nanometer production, we are confident that we will achieve a far majority foundry share in 16 nanometer in 2016 and beyond.”

Images: TSMC Q2 2015 presentation materials

Standard essential patent holders reined In

Court of Justice of the European Communities

Court of Justice of the European Communities

Standard essential patent (SEP) holders have been reined in by a court judgement yesterday limiting their rights to take legal action against rival companies.

Now, if you own standard essential patents, and you want to take out an injunction against a willing potential licensee, you could be found guilty of abusing a dominant position.

The European Court of Justice, the EU’s top court, ruled that SEP owners who seek injunctions against companies willing to license the intellectual property on fair and reasonable terms may be illegally abusing their dominance.

The case involved Huawei and ZTE of China.

Huawei sued ZTE in Germany for infringing its patents after haggling about royalties on a 4G patent.

The German court asked the ECJ to rule on whether Huawei’s failure to finalise a deal was an abuse of a dominant position.

The ECJ said companies owning SEPs must offer to complete licensing deals before taking legal action or they could be accused of abusing their dominance.

The ECJ ruled: “The bringing of an action for a prohibitory injunction against an alleged infringer by the proprietor of a standard-essential patent which holds a dominant position may constitute an abuse of that dominant position in certain circumstances.”

The ECJ stated that the patent holder must make a specific, written offer to prospective FRAND licensees proposing a licence agreement to them before it can take any legal action against them.