2023 Latest Semiconductor News from March 19th to 25th

Renesas acquires Panthronics (AG)

Renesas Electronics Corporation announced today that its wholly-owned subsidiary has entered into a definitive agreement with the shareholders of Panthronics AG that Renesas Electronics will acquire Panthronics in an all-cash transaction. The acquisition will enrich Renesas's portfolio of connectivity technologies, expanding its reach into near-field communication (NFC) applications, which are in high demand in fintech, IoT, asset tracking, wireless charging and automotive applications.

Global fab equipment spending for front-end facilities is expected to decline 22% year-on-year from a record $98 billion in 2022 to $76 billion in 2023, according to SEMI forecasts. By 2024, it will grow another 21% year-on-year.

The decline in 2023 will stem from weaker chip demand and higher inventories of consumer and mobile devices, SEMI said. Next year's recovery in fab equipment spending will be driven in part by the end of the semiconductor inventory correction in 2023 and stronger demand for semiconductors in high-performance computing (HPC) and automotive.

On March 22, Samsung launched the Exynos Connect U100 chip, whose name is very similar to Apple's U1 chip with ultra-wideband (UWB) functions. The new Samsung chip combines radio frequency, flash memory, baseband and power management technologies onto a single chip, making it suitable for compact devices such as the next-generation Galaxy SmartTag+. The chip also has on-board Scrambled Timestamp Sequence (STS) capability—a physical encryption technique that allows device-level encryption of the timestamps of packets.

The market size of SiC wafers in 2022 will be USD 820 million. It is expected to reach USD 2.94 billion by 2031, at a CAGR of 15.30% during the forecast period (2023-2031).

Recently, Straits Research released a forecast analysis of the SiC wafer market, the main highlights:

1) North America is still the main market.

2) According to wafer size, 2-inch, 3-inch and 4-inch still have a large market share.

3) Based on application, the global SiC wafer market is segmented into power supply, radio frequency (RF) and other applications.

4) Based on the end-user industry, the global SiC wafer market is divided into telecom and communication, electric vehicle (EV), photovoltaic/power supply/energy storage, industrial (ups and motor drives, etc.) and other end-user industries.

On March 24, Intel announced that its co-founder, Gordon Moore, died at his home in Hawaii at the age of 94. Moore is a pioneer in the semiconductor industry. In 1965, he proposed the famous Moore's Law. In 1968, he co-founded Intel with his colleague Robert Noyce, and served as the CEO from 1975 to 1987, also as the chairman in 1979. And became honorary chairman in 1997 until his retirement in 2006.

According to the Lianhe Zaobao report, the Chinese ambassador to the Netherlands, said in an interview with the Dutch Financial News that the Dutch government’s expansion of restrictions on the export of advanced chip manufacturing technology to China will have unknown consequences. "I wouldn't speculate on anti-restriction measures, but China won't simply accept it."

Tan Jian pointed out that the actions of the United States and its allies conflict with international trade rules and undermine global growth and supply chain stability. If the Netherlands does this, it will have a negative impact on our economic cooperation and our relationship.

A few days ago, at the Huawei hardware and software tools oath meeting, Xu Zhijun, Huawei's rotating chairman, said that Huawei's EDA tool team united with domestic EDA companies to jointly create the EDA tools required for 14nm and above processes, basically realizing the localization of 14nm and above EDA tools, and its comprehensive verification will be completed in 2023.

In recent days, Huawei has been announced good news about chips. It has just been revealed that it has completed the replacement of 13,000 components in three years. Under the new international situation, Huawei has embarked on a new path with a very high degree of independent control, setting a benchmark for the subsequent development of domestic software and domestic chips.

On March 21, local time in the United States, Marvell announced that it would lay off 320 employees, accounting for 4% of its total workforce, in response to the current economic downturn. This decision will abolish all the R&D teams in the China R&D zone, and the employees of Marvell in China have basically been notified. Marvell said in a statement that the company is streamlining its organization to ensure the employees can seize opportunities to emerge from the current industry down cycle.