NEWS
NOISE
Arm sets its sights on PCs and laptops – this time for real
Credit: Apple
A new processor war is brewing. Leveraging its power-efficiency advantage over the traditional X86 architecture, the Arm chip became king of the hill in the mobile arena. From there, it started to encroach on the data center, where it’s increasingly proving to get the same amount of work done while lowering power bills. And now, after some less-than-impressive attempts in the low end of the market, Arm has begun its siege on the last bastion of the X86 arena: PCs and laptops. Judging from the reviews, Apple’s new systems based on the in-house designed M1 chip deal a spectacular first punch by marrying high efficiency to high performance. But is it The octa-core M1 is manufactured fair to attribute this combo in a 5nm process. of highly desirable characteristics to the Arm SoC alone? As Ed Sperling of Semiengineering observed, Apple is in a unique position to design its hardware specifically in conjunction with software, allowing it to fine-tune just about everything. Perhaps it’s not a processor war after all, but a systems war. PvG
Credit: Samsung
Chips
Semicon
The American Foxconn factory that wasn’t
On 28 June 2018, President Trump pushed a golden shovel into a field in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, breaking ground on a planned Foxconn LCD factory. He said the heavily subsidized 10 billion dollar investment project was “one of the great deals, ever,” bringing manufacturing back to the United States and “restoring America’s industrial might.” Now, things aren’t looking so good anymore. According to a report issued by Wisconsin’s Division of Executive Budget and Finance, Foxconn has built a structure much more consistent with a Gen 6 LCD factory, instead of the promised Gen 10.5 factory that would employ 13,000 workers and create another 22,000 indirect jobs. And it’s not even an impressive Gen 6 at that: it would be the smallest in the world. Not that it matters much because Foxconn hasn’t ordered any manufacturing equipment. “Right now, the project looks dead,” Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC) CEO Ross Young told EE Times. PvG
Semicon
Semiconductor industry consolidation: the foundry wars
Eventually, there will be “less than a handful” leading-edge chip manufacturers, ASML CEO Peter Wennink recently told investors. “Things aren’t getting easier. The next nodes will see an increased complexity. And I think only the very large customers can deal with that,” he said. With this in mind, will there be room for two leading-edge foundries or will TSMC be the only one left standing? Currently, the Taiwanese foundry has a huge lead in terms of market share over Samsung’s foundry business: 50 percent versus
Samsung’s “Nano city” in Hwaseong.
15-20 percent. And while the Koreans serve some high-profile customers, such as Nvidia, IBM and Qualcomm, they’re trailing TSMC technologically. Management has vowed to close the gap in time for 3nm production to start in 2022, but Samsung starts the race with some major disadvantages. TSMC has many long-standing relationships with customers, smoothing the road to high yields, and many potential Samsung customers will be wary to outsource production to a direct competitor. On the other hand, the fabless industry might like to have more than one foundry to choose from, instead of creating a monopolist. The next couple of years are sure to be interesting. PvG
Energy
Renewable power defies Covid, but renewable energy does not
Many parts of the energy sector, such as oil, gas and coal, took a hit from the Covid-19 crisis, but renewable power isn’t one of them. Driven by China and the United States, new additions of renewable-power capacity worldwide will increase to a record level of almost 200 gigawatts this year, the International Energy Agency’s Renewables 2020 report forecasts. This rise – representing almost 90 percent of the total expansion in overall power capacity globally – is led by wind, hydropower and solar PV. Wind and solar additions are set to jump by 30 percent in both the United States and China as developers rush to take advantage of expiring incentives. However, renewables outside the electricity sector, such as biofuels and industrial bio-energy, are suffering from the impacts of the pandemic The net result of these declines and the growth of renewable power is an expected overall increase of 1 percent in global renewable-energy demand in 2020. Next year, the IEA expects that number to be 10 percent. PvG
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