Samsung, Apple, Xiaomi and China

Samsung face challenge due to lost business of Apple’s iPhones chips on one side (see October 2012 blog - Apple Cutting Out Samsung Chips )

While on the other side Samsung is squeezed by the rise of local cell phone vendors in china such as Xiaomi, Coolpad, Huawei, Lenovo, and ZTE (see Jan 2013 blog - Apples' Cook in China (MediaTek Impact). In addition see today's introduction of Xiaomi launches MIUI 6, makes Android look more like iOS 7

More on the fast rise of Xiaomi that "in the smartphone market in one of the world's biggest markets, research firm Canalys has revealed that Xiaomi was the market leader in its home territory of China, jumping ahead of Samsung for the first time in Q2 2014.

In the three months to the end of June, Xiaomi held a 14% market share in China with Samsung, Lenovo and CoolPad all trailing with 12% of the market while Huawei creeped into fifth spot with an 11% market share.

While it is not surprising to see Xiaomi at the top of the charts, the speed it has happened is surprising. In the first quarter of 2014, Samsung held an 18% market share while Xiaomi held just over 10%."  

Samsung respond by introducing a smartphone for china mobile as detailed in the article below.

Ron
Insightful, timely, and accurate semiconductor consulting.
Semiconductor information and news at - http://www.maltiel-consulting.com/

Samsung Launches Galaxy Win Pro Smartphone for China Mobile Powered by Marvell's ARMADA Mobile PXA1088 Quad-Core Platform 

February 18, 2014, 8:06 a.m. ET

Marvell's field-proven unified multi-core 3G mobile platform solution enables Samsung's latest world phone, the Galaxy Win Pro, to serve China Mobile's vast subscriber base with global WCDMA roaming capability

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 18, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Marvell (Nasdaq: MRVL) today announced the launch of the Galaxy Win Pro Smartphone for China Mobile powered by Marvell's ARMADA(R) Mobile PXA1088 Quad-Core Platform. Marvell's unified multi-core 3G mobile platform solution enables Samsung's Galaxy Win Pro, to serve China Mobile's vast subscriber base with global WCDMA roaming capability. The ARMADA Mobile PXA1088 single-chip platform is designed to drive high-quality and high-performance affordable solutions for mobile devices, furthering the "Smart Life and Smart Lifestyle." The Samsung Galaxy Win Pro is designed for China Mobile's expansive customer base and supports Global System for Mobile (GSM) and Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA) Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) to enable customers to have seamless Internet access regardless of location. With the Samsung Galaxy Win Pro, traveling is made easy for China Mobile's subscribers since they do not have to carry or lease extra 3G phones for global roaming with WCDMA/HSPA+.

"I am very proud to see the launch of Samsung's Galaxy Win Pro, quad-core-based mass-market smartphone for the world's largest mobile operator, China Mobile. Samsung's global leadership in delivering such affordable mobile devices with outstanding performance has enriched the lives of billions of consumers around the world through better communication and education," said Weili Dai, President and Co-Founder of Marvell. "I am very proud of our close collaboration with all key partners in the mobile ecosystem in driving the 'Smart Life and Smart Lifestyle.' I am very thankful to Samsung for their collaboration and dedication and thankful to Marvell's global teams of talented engineers for the passion, innovation and tireless effort to the successful launch of this great Galaxy smartphone."

The Samsung Galaxy Win Pro is a TD-SCDMA/GSM and W-CDMA/GSM dual-mode design that uses Marvell's all-in-one unified mobile computing platform, including wireless modem and RF transceiver that provide 3G world phone support. This enables the Samsung Galaxy Win Pro to be the choice of China Mobile's subscribers who needs to travel overseas. In addition to Marvell's ARMADA Mobile PXA1088, the Galaxy Win Pro also features the latest Marvell's RF839 3G radio transceiver, Marvell's advanced Avastar(R) 88W8777 IEEE802.11n Wi-Fi connectivity, and L2000 GPS. It also features a 4.5-inch qHD high resolution display, a 5MP camera and 8GB MLC storage with 1GB LPDDR2 memory.

About the Marvell ARMADA Mobile PXA1088:

The Marvell PXA1088 is a highly integrated quad-core application and communications mobile System-on-Chip (SoC) designed to provide high-performance, low-power mobile computing; support for all global broadband 3G standards, enabling seamless global roaming; and the latest wireless connectivity technology. Marvell's PXA1088 platform incorporates the performance of a quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 with Marvell's mature and field-proven cellular modem, including support for High Speed Packet Access Plus (HSPA+), Time Division High Speed Packet Access Plus (TD-HSPA+) and Enhanced Data for GSM Environment (EDGE). The PXA1088 enables a breakthrough end user experience for multimedia and gaming applications with universal connectivity. Marvell's complete mobile platform solution includes Marvell's advanced Avastar 88W8777 WLAN + Bluetooth 4.0 + FM single-chip SoC and the 88L2000 GNSS Hybrid Location Processor, and an integrated power management and audio codec IC. Marvell's unified mobile platform, includes the PXA986, PXA988, PXA1088 and PXA1088LTE, thus enabling easy migration from dual-core to quad-core solutions and support for TD-SCDMA, WCDMA and LTE.

Update: Chromcast Use Marvell and Azurewave

Google Chromcast is a game changer for tv media delivery. based on FCC documents (see below) "Marvell DE3005 chip, plus Azurewave hardware to handle its (2Ghz only) WiFi duties"


More in depth evaluation of Chromcast (power needs, iOS support, local files viewing)

Ron
Insightful, timely, and accurate semiconductor consulting.
Semiconductor information and news at - http://www.maltiel-consulting.com/

Google Chromecast H2G2-42 FCC documents show off what's inside the $35 dongle

By Richard Lawler posted Jul 24th, 2013 at 8:44 PM

---

Even though Google only announced its new Chromecast HDMI dongle earlier today, we got our first peek at it in May. That's when the mysterious H2G2-42 leaked in FCC documents, with few details other than the name referencing Douglas Adams' book. As Anandtech's Brian Klug points out, the documents have been updated, and now include a few pictures of the Chromecast with its external casing removed. Inside there's a Marvell DE3005 chip, plus Azurewave hardware to handle its (2Ghz only) WiFi duties. Hit the link below to take a look, although at the $35 sticker price you can probably afford to do an iSuppli-style teardown of your own.

Intel, ASML: Higher Performance/ Lower Cost Edge

Intel's investment in ASML will increase Intel's process technology leads. Intel will have stronger ties to leading-edge lithography processes and to the next generation of 450mm wafer tools.

Some key points in the article are below:

" Intel can now force the game forward and even Apple will now have to consider how wise it is to hang back in older processes. Some amount of their processors will need to step up to the leading edge for cost and performance reasons. "

"every survivor going vertical, however now we are looking at two separate vertical models. There is the device vertical model with LCD screens, NAND Flash, enclosures etc.. that Apple and Samsung are very adept at. In last weeks blog I mentioned how Intel was funding Taiwanese panel makers to guarantee supply for ultrabook manufacturers (likely at the expense of AMD and nVidia). Now we have Intel letting the world know that being a MAN in the semiconductor industry requires owning more than just fabs. Real Men must now invest in the semiconductor R&D tool chain."

Ron




Intel Opens a New Front with ASML

www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/1458-intel-opens-new-front-asml.html?goback=%2Egde_30219_member_132694891

by Ed McKernan
Published on 07-10-2012 02:00 PM

Behind great humor often lies irony. In the midst of a struggle by the European Union to extract $1.3B from Intel in an ages old Anti-Trust case, the latter makes a strategic move to embolden the Dutch firm ASML to accelerate the development of 450mm and EUV and thus save a continental jewel. What now say EU? When disfunction and bankruptcy abound, beware the need of sovereigns to extract not pints but gallons of blood. Intel sees an end game at hand, not today but in just a couple of years and it plays into its plans to win all of mobile: including Apple and Samsung. They parry the EU assault with a massive $4B investment and prepare to watch the poker players ante up or fold.



Intel Always Fights a Multi-front war knowing that it eventually wears down the enemy. Please, please we don’t speak of enemies unless we are in the realm of politics! However, one should be aware that without TSMC there is no Qualcomm, nVidia, AMD, Broadcom, Marvell and the rest of the ARM camp (especially ARM). And what of Apple and Samsung, the two leaders of the mobile Tsunami who will have 80%+ of the Smartphone and Tablet market by the New Year? They will have a choice to make in which the first one who blinks will have the opportunity to be years ahead of the other.



It is simple mathematics. Assume, conservatively that Intel is two years ahead of TSMC. Now presume Intel, conservatively launches 450mm two years ahead of TSMC, then it is like a 4 year lead in process technology. Now input your die sizes and run the cost models. It is daunting having to stare up at the Matterhorn before the climb begins.



We have learned in the past 6 months that Smartphones and Tablets are demanding leading edge process technology (Qualcomm sold out this year on 28nm 4G LTE chips). This was the one doubt that I had as to whether Qualcomm, nvidia and the rest of the ARM camp were safe in the foundries at an n-1 node while Intel played catch up with a true low power processor and baseband functionality. Intel can now force the game forward and even Apple will now have to consider how wise it is to hang back in older processes. Some amount of their processors will need to step up to the leading edge for cost and performance reasons.



The news articles from yesterday stated that ASML was open to additional investments from other foundries (i.e. TSMC and Samsung). I can see Samsung stepping up. TSMC is an extension of Qualcomm, Broadcom, nVidia and others. They will likely have to devise new long-term agreements from their partners that requires them to pony up dollars for the ASML investment. Or alternatively does Qualcomm write a check to ASML?Does Apple?



The maneuvers lately point to every survivor going vertical, however now we are looking at two separate vertical models. There is the device vertical model with LCD screens, NAND Flash, enclosures etc.. that Apple and Samsung are very adept at. In last weeks blog I mentioned how Intel was funding Taiwanese panel makers to guarantee supply for ultrabook manufacturers (likely at the expense of AMD and nVidia). Now we have Intel letting the world know that being a MAN in the semiconductor industry requires owning more than just fabs. Real Men must now invest in the semiconductor R&D tool chain. The Question that Wall St. should ask is the following: What is the total value that will derive 4-5 years down the line from an investment in ASML’s R&D?





FULL DISCLOSURE: I am Long AAPL, INTC, QCOM, ALTR

Status of China's Fabless Model

The large demand for smartphone chips in China will cause local Chinese design houses to grow faster in the next few years.

Ron












source: IC Insights






Is China's fabless model sustainable?

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4375636/Is-China-fabless-model-sustainable?pageNumber=1
Junko Yoshida

6/19/2012 9:11 AM EDT



How many U.S. design engineers can name, say, the top 10 Chinese chip vendors destined to become their fierce competitors in three years from now? BEIJING -- Let’s face it. China’s IC industry still lacks its own superstars – equivalent to Intel, Qualcomm or Broadcom in the West – in terms of the scale, reach and quality these brands possess on the global market.

To belabor the point, how many U.S. design engineers can name, say, the top 10 Chinese chip vendors destined to become their fierce competitors in three years from now? The question is tough because Chinese fabless companies, while growing fast, are still small. Many also remain faceless.

In contrast, a Chinese executive based in Beijing, speaking with ee Times, rattled off Spreadtrum, RDA Microelectronics, GalaxyCore and GigaDevice as his “top four” picks among local fabless companies likely to become key players in the smartphone IC ecosystem. The executive, heading up a U.S.-based chip company’s R&D team, believes that will happen not within the decade, but in just a few years.


Is he right?
EE Times has talked to several movers and shakers in China’s semiconductor industry in recent weeks. While our investigation is still in progress, we’ll be reporting our ongoing findings in a two-part series. First, we examine the state of the Chinese fabless industry -- covering how they’ve gotten to where they are today. In part two, we discuss what Chinese semiconductor companies must do in order to cross the chasm – from local heroes in China to power players on the global stage.



On one hand, some multinationals like Synopsys (EDA vendor), VeriSilicon (“Design-Lite” service company) and ARM (IP supplier) are well positioned to leverage local engineering resources to respond to Chinese fabless companies’ always pressing (and almost impatient) need to get ahead more quickly.

On the other, Chinese startups, still in early days, lack a portfolio of their own IPs. Consequently, “they tend to compete on price with similar products in the same application fields,” observed Jian-Yue Pan, corporate vice president, Asia Pacific region of Synopsys.


Meanwhile, some China fabless are coming up with fresh ideas (i.e.Apexone), operating with an incredible work ethic and directing a fanatical focus on customer service (i.e. Awinic). Companies like RDA, Spreadtrum and Rockchip are growing like gangbusters.


It’s important to note that there is nothing monolithic about China or China’s fabless companies. Over the last two decades, a number of Chinese chip companies – some well known in the West – had distinct trajectories, with a full array of ups and downs. Some disappeared and others thrived, their fates depending on when each company was born, how it was managed, and whether the ecosystem in China was sufficient to spur growth.

Synopsys’ Pan turns out to be as good a student and observer of the Chinese semiconductor industry as any, since he has lived through the rise of the industry over the last 17 years while working at Synopsys in China.

Pan isn’t a returnee – like many other China fabless executives today who were born in China and came to the United States for graduate degrees, before going home again to help nurture the Chinese industry.

Pan is home-grown. He has worked his entire professional life in China, rather than in Silicon Valley, after graduation from the nation’s elite Tsinghua University in early the 1990’s.


Chinese fabless companies have come a long way


In the interview, Pan said, “A lot of things have happened. Over the last 17 years, we saw the rise of the Korean chip industry, and the decline of Japanese companies.” To illustrate the rise of the Chinese semiconductor industry, Pan divided the last 17 years in three periods: “incubation” (1995 – 2001); “breakthrough” (2001 – 2007); and “acceleration” (2007 – 2012).
Incubation

During the incubation period, virtually all the companies taking part in the Chinese semiconductor industry were state-owned. They were largely pushed, prompted and nurtured by Chinese government’s industrial policy and technology transfers from other countries including the United States, Europe and Japan.
During this period, the total revenue of the Chinese IC design houses was “less than $100 million,” according to Pan.


Nonetheless, several important milestones helped pave the way for the birth of the Chinese semiconductor industry. They include: the completion of technology transfer between Lucent and Huajing in 1997, allowing Huajing—located in Wuxi in Jiangsu Province—to start producing 6-inch CMOS wafers with 0.9 micron design rules. By 1999, SDRAM production started on the 8-inch wafer fab at HHNEC (Hua Hong NEC Electronics Co.) using a 0.35 micron process technology. These were days when few indigenous fabless companies existed in China. These fabs had to depend on the international semiconductor community for consumption, as well as for technical support.


But the most significant milestone of all during this period, according to Pan, was the emergence of the Chinese central government’s “Policy No. 18.” Put in place in July, 2000, the directive was a top-down order to “encourage the development of the IC industry in China,” explained Pan. Under Policy 18, the government offered favorable tax treatment to domestically produced IC chips, while providing heavy government investment in infrastructure, education and basic research.

As a result, seven state-owned incubation centers for IC design sprang up, with Synopsys coming out as one of the big beneficiaries. It turns out that the seven state-owned IC design centers standardized their design flow environment on Synopsys tools, making Synopsys the government’s favored tool designer.


Breakthrough

The following six years (2001 – 2007) is when the Chinese semiconductor industry saw a number of breakthroughs, fueled by the growth of the Chinese economy and adherence to Policy 18. Pan observed that in 2000, there were fewer than 100 fabless companies in China. But 2003, more than 450 fabless had vendors popped up. Also emerging was China’s strategic mimicry of the Silicon Valley model, using stock-based compensation to incentivize managers and engineers in high-tech companies.


In 2003, Hangzhou Silan Microelectronics Co., Ltd, popularly known as Silan Corporation, became the first IC vendor on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Silan successfully made an IPO, initiated with 26 million shares of series A-stock
By 2006, both Vimicro International Corporation and Actions Semiconductor had gone through a rigorous IPO process and got listed in Nasdaq. In 2007, Spreadtrum went public and joined the Nasdaq club.


Acceleration

Pan now sees the Chinese semiconductor industry in its third phase, where everything is accelerating. There are five more Chinese companies on a wait-list to go public on Nasdaq.As of 2011, China had close to 500 fabless chip companies, with total revenue last year at “give or take, close to $10 billion,” Pan said.

Where do they go from here?
Over the last three years, “some startups – including GigaDevice, GalaxyCore, RDA and Rockchip – have grown very fast,” according to Datong Chen, co-founder and managing director of West Summit Capital in Beijing. There is no dispute about that
The question, however, is how sustainable it is for these companies to continue to grow so rapidly. How many more years can Chinese companies continuously keep gross margin low and perpetually work harder in order to bring down the cost of their products in hopes of beating out foreign competition?
In the top 20 fabless IC companies’ ranking for 2011 (put together by IC Insights), only two from China, HiSilicon and Spreadtrum, showed up.
Top 20 fabless IC companies in 201

source: IC Insights

Datong has experienced firsthand the rise of the Chinese chip industry, as he was the co-founder and CTO of Spreadtrum Communications. Prior to Spreadtrum, Datong was the co-founder and senior vice present for Omnivision, a leading developer of CMOS imaging sensor.

For Chinese fabless companies to sustain current growth, Datong said, “They need a bigger platform.” By “platform,” he means, “Money, a larger market size, and a bigger customer base.” Then, he added, “Of course, it’s better if they do IPOs – because that will allow them to get fair market value, it would make it much easier for them to do acquisitions, and they will get more trust from the market.”
The potential for Chinese fabless companies to reap greater rewards are already here, according to Allen Wu, president of ARM China. ARM-based SoCs, designed by Chinese fabless companies and shipped globally, jumped from 30 million units in 2007 to 615 million units in 2011.
And yet, Wayne Dai, president and CEO of VeriSilion, calls the Chinese semiconductor industry a “no-man’s-land of fabless companies.” He explained that most of the 400+ China fabless companies are living through a 'no man’s land,' which he describes "an inflection point for a start up’s life cycle.

In his view, "[Chinese fabless companies] are too big to be small, but too small to be big." In other words, "If they can’t continue to grow, evolving into firms that dramatically change their marketplace or define a new category, they have to either stay small or sell to a larger company. Otherwise, they are going out of business within the next two years."
In essence, most Chinese fabless companies remain too stubbornly small to exploit the market’s size. There lies the conundrum.
In part two of this article, we’ll discuss prescriptions—what steps Chinese fabless companies must take, and conversely, what actions multinationals should take to survive among all those Chinese go-getters.

Palm Pre Teardown

First look inside the Palm PreModular design leaves mysteries on battery, display

SAN JOSE, Calif. — A teardown of the Palm Pre reveals few surprises, but leaves two intriguing questions unanswered.It's not clear from a first inspection of the Pre's internals why the handset is delivering subpar battery performance in early reviews. Analysts are also scratching their heads over why Cypress Semiconductor is not providing technical information on what appears to be a new multi-touch display controller used in the cellphone.The Palm Pre went on sale June 6 after debuting at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The handset has been of the most anticipated new cellphone designs since the iPhone, in part because Jon Rubinstein, the company's recently installed executive chairman, was the former vice president of engineering at Apple's iPod division. Additional details

Rick Merritt/ (06/07/2009 6:45 PM EDT) / www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=2177021