GLG News by Semiconductor Evaluators (North America)

At a market cap of $7-8B and $2+B in the bank, along with healthy free cash flow, Sun is starting to look ripe for an acquisition.  It’s becoming increasingly clear that Sun’s current business model isn’t working, but their IP, customer base, brand recognition and employee base makes them attr...

VMWare is doing great, so how could they be in trouble?  By having both Microsoft and open source invade their market.  Their easy growth is in the past, and now the question becomes whether they can thrive in a highly competitive environment.

According to the media and several prominent individuals, SaaS is the future of the software business.  The “old-fashioned” licensed software model is doomed.  Yet the most profitable and biggest software companies have only a limited presence in SaaS.  Does this mean they are out of...

* USB 2.0 provides external data rates of 480 Mbps sustained.  eSATA, an external version of the SATA interface currently provides data rates of 3 Gbps sustained  * Next generation USB will have 5 Gbps and next generation eSATA will have 6 Gbps data rates * Recently several laptop and external...

* Oerlikon sold its disk drive sputtering assets to Intevac and exits the hard disk drive business  * Oerlikon, in a former incarnation as Balzers used to be one of the major players in the disk sputtering equipment market but had lost most of its business over the last 10 years  * Despite...

Motorola’s new camera phone won’t be enough to resuscitate their ailing handset business, but it does show that some innovation still lives within Motorola.  This is not the second coming of the RAZR, but is a good beginning if they can follow with other innovative products.

SSD's will replace HDD's in Notebooks and Blade servers within the next five years. Anybody who wants to participate in this market needs access to competitive NAND flash products and have stability of supply. 

 Seagate has stated that they will introduce a SSD device by the end of 2008 This is expected to be an enterprise level SSD to help protect the company’s position in the enterprise storage market There are several rumors that Seagate is looking at acquisitions to enable its SSD effort Intel...

* Hitachi president Kazuo Furukawa said that Hitachi wants to surpass Seagate’s HDD business profitability  * Furukawa-san said that Hitachi has the latest technology required to be competive in the HDD business  * He also said that there is synergy between Hitachi’s computer business and...

LTE is going to win WiMax because LTE is a part of the 3GPP. WiMax is mainly supported by Intel that has never been successful in the wireless industry. Practically, I don’t see a mobile user, with 2 or 4 or even 4 inch screen, using more than 10Mbps on his device. Given that most of the fancy devices...