Noise

AI Tis the season to be shopping The greatest gift of the US people to the world is Black Friday. Not the commercial event per se, but the stream of video clips that entertain the more civilized parts of the planet every year. It’s nice to feel superior over the ’Merican riffraff fighting their ways into stores to get their grubby hands on some piece of 50 percent off hardware or jewelry that was doubled in price before it got discounted. Cyber Monday shoppers, too, may feel particularly smug when getting their package handed to them by the delivery guy. But don’t think for one second online shoppers don’t have to put up a fight. According to cybersecurity firm Radware ‘shopping bots’ are on the rise. They buy discounted or limited supply items and then sell them somewhere else at a markup. And since no human can compete with bots at filling out online forms, it really is a fight no ordinary shopper can win. PvG

Top-15 semiconductor suppliers by revenue (in million dollars)

Rank 2019 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Rank 2018 2 1 4 3 5 6 7 8 9 10 15 11 13 12 14

Company

Intel Samsung

TSMC SK Hynix

Micron Broadcom Qualcomm

TI Toshiba Nvidia Sony

ST Infineon

NXP Mediatek Top 15 Revenue 2019 69,832 55,601 34,503 22,886 19,960 17,706 14,300 13,547 11,276 10,514 9,552 9,456 8,946 8,857 7,948 314,893 2019/2018 (%) 0 -29 1 -38 -35 -3 -13 -9 -18 -12 24 -2 -3 -6 1 -15 Source: IC Insights

It’s a rather meager year in semiconductors, with IC Insights expecting a worldwide revenue decline of 13 percent in 2019. The top-15 fares a little worse even, with revenue dropping two points more. Only three companies manage to register year-over-year growth: Sony, TSMC and Mediatek. Only Sony manages to really impress, though, with revenue expected to increase 24 percent thanks to surging image sensor sales. NXP registers a 6-percent sales decline this year, which compared to its top-15 peers is middle-of-the-road. However, the average is strongly affected by the strong downturn in the memory industry, with growth rates ranging from -18 to -38 percent. Excluding memory makers, NXP finds itself at the lower end of the spectrum. PvG

Telecom Huawei doesn’t need US hardware If the US export ban on many tech products was meant to put China in its place, it may be failing, The Wall Street Journal suggested recently. The newspaper had access to a teardown analysis, which showed that Huawei’s flagship smartphone, the Mate 30, contains not a single US component. The post-ban phone has audio chips from NXP on board, for example, instead of Cirrus Logic in previous versions. The discovery shouldn’t come as a surprise, however, as analysis by Ars Technica on another highend phone showed that the Chinese phone makers actually already sourced most of their components from outside the US. Furthermore, a Huawei executive told Bloomberg that “the company has known [a US export ban] could be a possibility for many years. We’ve invested heavily and made full preparations in a variety of areas, including R&D and business continuity.” Clearly, hardware isn’t the problem for Huawei. Software and apps are an entirely different story, however. PvG

RF A blessing in disguise The Netherlands-China Low-Frequency Explorer (NCLE) had to wait in space for over a year before being deployed. That was longer than planned, as the Chinese Queqiao satellite host took more time than anticipated to finish its primary mission, ie serving as a relay station for communications between a moon lander and terrestrial ground stations. The prolonged exposure to the coldness of space may have caused the NCLE’s three antennas to not deploy properly: while one extended to the full five meters, the other two only managed half of that. Not all is lost, however. NCLE’s primary mission

was to observe the Sun and Jupiter at low frequencies. This cannot be done from Earth because the ionosphere absorbs this part of the EM spectrum. But the research teams also hoped to pick up signals from when the first stars were born in the universe, or even from before that. For this objective, the shorter-than-intended antennas are actually a boon: they’re more sensitive to the particular frequencies associated with the “Cosmic Dawn”. PvG