GLG News by Semiconductor Experts (North America)

Recessions have a winnowing effect on companies.  Once the bad times are past those who survived without major damage are stronger, largely at the expense of the others.  Keys to survival include cash (lots of it!), a solid market position and competitive products.

* The replacement of one technology by another is drive by economic factors among which is the cost of building manufacturing facilities  * HDDs manufactured in 2008 probably will have provided over 100 Exabytes of total new storage, all the flash memory produced in 2008 probably amounts to only...

* Hitachi Global Storage Technology (HGST) is the third leading manufacturer of enterprise HDDs  * Intel announced a family of high performance, low overhead solid state drives last Summer  * Intel’s current products do not include enterprise SAS or Fibre Channel interface SSDs  * HGST...

*  Fujitsu is the number 2 supplier of enterprise HDDs, behind Seagate but ahead of HGST*  Fujitsu also supplies 2.5-inch drives for the notebook market*  Fujitsu has been rumored to be in talks to sell the HDD unit for many months since the unit has been losing money*  Several companies...

Web 2.0 will most likely become a key technology for enterprise IT, but adoption is slow for many reasons.  Security, functionality, ROI are all areas that have generally not yet been fully addressed, along with finding time for IT people to become comfortable with the technology.

1. Most luminaire firms are what the industry calls bulb heads.  They bend sheet metal and plastic, and screw in a bulb of varying technologies -- incandescent, flourescent, metal halogen, etc.  These firms tend to have very little knw how when it comes to implementing LED technology. 2....

1. Toshiba is the number 2 manufacturer of NAND Flash and also the fab partner of SanDisk.  If Toshiba is idling capacity it is most probable that other NAND flash manufactuers will also take some capacity offline. 2. I believe that SanDisk will also annnounce that it will reduce some production...

Samsung entering into the foundry business could cause a major shift in the ranking of the three big foundries: TSMC. UMC and Chartered. Up to this point there were many rumors on some major fabless companies (TI, Qualcom) evaluating Samsung foundry capability. Samsung known to be very...

Xilinx can quicken its entry into 40nm FPGA production using Samsung, but risks losing the capacity if and when Samsung gets busier. Obviously, Samsung would rather sell its own branded products as the margin is higher. The risks for Xilinx are mitigated because of the similar foundries offered by...

Novell product vs. profit