Items tagged with semiconductors
Qualcomm on Tuesday increased its bid to buy NXP Semiconductors, agreeing to pay $127.50 for each share of the Dutch chipmaker. The revised amount is 16 percent higher than what Qualcomm originally proposed last October, which at the time stood at $110 per share. Qualcomm's amended agreement is an aggressive move that...
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TSMC has broken ground on a new 5nm fab that will be used to produce the world's first 5-nanometer chips starting in 2020. TSMC builds chips for numerous manufacturers, including NVIDIA, Qualcomm and many others. The new Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 mobile chips coming this year are built on the TSMC 7nm technology. With...
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Broadcom is hoping to pull of the largest technology transaction of all time in its bid to acquire Qualcomm. The company made an ambitious cash and stock offer valued at around $130 billion, and it stands whether Qualcomm is able to consummate its deal to acquire NXP Semiconductors at $110 per share or not. Either...
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Samsung today announced that it is ready to start producing semiconductors based on its 8-nanometer FinFET Low Power Plus (LPP) manufacturing process. The company's newest process node provides up to 10 percent lower power consumption compared to its 10nm LPP process, and also takes up 10 percent less space due to a...
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When it comes to electronics, semiconductors make the world go round. This has been true for many decades, though future generations will own devices with different physical makeups than those that are in use today. That includes a potential move away from silicon. In what could be a glimpse into the future...
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We might be reaching a point where mid-range smartphones are good enough for most people. That may seem like a double-edged sword for Qualcomm, which just announced its new Snapdragon 450 processor for such devices, but there is still room at the high-end for things like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR)...
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The memory chip wars are heating up. Just four months ago, Western Digital kicked off pilot production of the industry's first 64-layer 512-gigabyte (Gb) 3D NAND flash memory. While it will take some time to reach mass production status, that's exactly where Samsung is now at with its 64-layer 256Gb Vertical NAND...
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Foxconn is attempting to acquire Toshiba's semiconductor business though it is not going at it alone. According to multiple reports, both Apple and Amazon have joined forces with Foxconn to grab a piece of the sale, with each company offering up an untold amount of financial backing to help push the deal...
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IBM has teamed up with semiconductor equipment suppliers and manufacturing bigwigs GlobalFoundries and Samsung to develop a new process for building silicon nanosheet transistors. This new process paves a path to 5-nanometer, with the subsequent "fingernail-sized" chips packing a staggering 30 billion transistors...
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In the high stakes game of semiconductors, technologies related to processor nodes are closely guarded secrets as companies try to trump one another with die shrinks and other advances in silicon research and development. As you might imagine, espionage can be a problem. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company...
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The word from South Korea is that Samsung plans to invest $6.98 billion (8 trillion South Korean Won) into extending its high-tech semiconductor production lines. Specifically, Samsung is looking to remain on the cutting edge by making supplemental investments into its 10-nanometer production lines while building out...
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Samsung today announced that it has begun mass producing its Exynos 9 series 8895 application processor (AP), the first processor chipset built on an advanced 10-nanometer FinFET manufacturing process. It is expected that the Exynos 8895 will find its way into one of the versions of Samsung's next flagship smartphone...
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Samsung has some big decisions to make. The company finds itself in the midst of a reorganization effort following its global recall of Galaxy Note 7 handsets, and where it goes from here is very much up in the are. Behind closed doors, the company is said to be considering a split, and now it's being reported that...
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Mobile chip maker Qualcomm has inked a definitive agreement to purchase NXP Semiconductors in a deal valued at around $47 billion. The board of directors of both companies gave unanimous approval for the acquisition, which will see Qualcomm buy all of NXP's stock at $110 per share, an 11.5 percent premium over NXP's...
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Advanced Micro Device's tally for its fiscal third quarter reached just $1.3 billion. That represents a jump of 23 percent from the same quarter a year prior on strong demand for its semiconductors used in game consoles, and it beat out what analysts were expecting. That's the good news. The bad news is that it wasn't...
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Shrinking semiconductors to 10-nanometers is no easy task—just ask Intel, which pushed back the release of its 10nm Cannonlake architecture until 2017. Samsung, however, is having better luck with it. The South Korean outfit announced on Monday that it has begun mass product of system-on-chip (SoC) products based on...
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It's a pretty remarkable thing that, for the most part, Moore's Law has been accurate for over 50 years, helping to set the pace for processor design for several decades. However, Moore's Law is in serious trouble of being broken if, as a group of researchers predict, transistors stop shrinking within the next five...
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Samsung could use a financial boost after a decline in mobile profit led to the company posting an overall loss last year. It has a new boss in charge of mobile, and to keep the cash flowing (and investors happy), Samsung will produce 14nm CPU and GPU semiconductors for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) starting in 2016.
AMD currently has all
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Samsung's been in somewhat of a sales funk ever since the launch of its Galaxy S5. Consumers had grown bored with the recycled design of the Galaxy series, and though the premium overhaul of the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge sparked renewed interest in the company's flagship phone line, manufacturing troubles prevented...
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IBM Research on Thursday announced that it has produced the semiconductor industry's first 7-nanometer node test chips with functioning transistors. The accomplishment was a joint effort with partners GlobalFoundries, Samsung, and SUNY Polytechnic Institute's Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering.
It's also...
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Three atoms thick. According to a paper published this week in the science journal Nature by a group of researchers from Cornell University, that is the breadth of the transistors that can now be produced using an experimental — and highly conductive — material called transition metal dichalcogenide (also called a...
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Intel is reportedly attempting to negotiate a deal to acquire Altera, an American company that designs and manufacturers FPGAs, or field-programmable gate arrays. The figure that's out there is $10 billion, and if it happens, it would be Intel's largest acquisition ever. It would also help Intel expand its presence in...
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