Global chip revenue increased by 1.5% in 2016 as a late-year surge enabled the semiconductor industry to avoid widely anticipated contraction, according to market research firm Gartner Inc.

Total semiconductor sales for the year totaled $339.7 billion last year, up from $334.8 billion in 2015, according to Gartner’s estimates. Combined sales for the top 25 chip vendors increased 7.9% compared to 2015, accounting for 75.9% of the market, Gartner (Stamford, Conn.) said.

“Overall, semiconductor revenue for the second half of the year was much stronger than the first half, reflecting the strengthening memory market and continued inventory replenishment, as well as inventory build for both the iPhone 7 and the holiday season,” Blanco said.

SAN FRANCISCO–Global semiconductor sales posted a year-to-year sales increase of 7.4% in November 2016 as the chip industry continued to pick up steam headed into the end of the year, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) trade group.

The November increase was the largest for the semiconductor industry since January 2015, the SIA said.

November’s jump in sales increases the likelihood that semiconductor sales for 2016 may have been flat with 2015.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) says that 10nm is on schedule, countering news media reports that the yields of TSMC and Samsung at the industry’s most advanced technology node are lagging expectations.

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (Menlo Park, Calif.) — known now as SLAC — has demonstrated what it claims are the thinnest possible nanowires — just three-atoms thin. SLAC’s process uses the smallest possible fragment of a diamond — called a diamondoid — as an insulating shell into which the copper/sulfur atoms self-assemble. The world’s smallest diamondoid — an adamantane with just a 10-atom circumference — allows a three atom conductive core to self-assemble to any length.

With carbon nanotubes poised to become the smallest possible transistors channel, it makes sense for SLAC to be working on the interconnection technology for the tiny transistors of the future. Like nanotubes, they have a long way to go before the self-assembly process is reliable and accurate enough to start fabricating trillion-transistor chips, but the potential is there.

Faced with the prospect of a multibillion-dollar write-down that could wipe out its shareholders’ equity, Japan’s Toshiba is running out of fixes: It is burning cash, cannot issue shares, and has few easy assets left to sell. The Tokyo-based conglomerate, which is still recovering from a $1.3 billion accounting scandal in 2015, dismayed investors and lenders again this week by announcing that cost overruns at a U.S. nuclear business bought only last year meant it could now face a crippling charge against profit.

Battered Toshiba out of easy options to plug nuclear hole
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-toshiba-accounting-options-analysis-idUSKBN14I12J

Faced with the prospect of a multi-billion-dollar writedown that could wipe out its shareholders’ equity, Japan’s Toshiba is running out of fixes: it is burning cash, cannot issue shares and has few easy assets left to sell.

The Tokyo-based conglomerate, which is still recovering from a $1.3 billion accounting scandal in 2015, dismayed investors and lenders again this week by announcing that cost overruns at a U.S. nuclear business bought only last year meant it could now face a crippling charge against profit.

Toshiba cannot raise cash by issuing shares because of restrictions imposed by the stock exchange after last year’s scandal.

Its loss-making PC and TV businesses would be poor candidates for sale, while its many cross-shareholdings are unlikely to fetch enough.

“Toshiba doesn’t have many saleable assets in hand,”

“Toshiba will probably need to sell 30-40 percent of the NAND business in an IPO to secure enough cash,”

Defective Parts Per Million (DPPM) is one of the key metrics used to measure quality in many semiconductor segments. With electronics becoming more and more a part of everyday life (wearable electronics and semi-autonomous vehicles), there’s increasing pressure to improve quality across all semiconductor market segments. For mission-critical segments such as automotive and medical, market forces are driving improvements in quality into the Defective Parts Per Billion (DPPB) range.

For the semiconductor industry, achieving this next level of device quality will require the automotive value chain to put in place a large-scale analytics flow that can automatically analyze manufacturing data in real-time to detect quality issues on the manufacturing floor (See How big is big data?). Manufacturing data will also need to be integrated with all Return Materials Authorizations (RMA) so that known failures can be correlated back to the source material, which can let manufacturers screen out future devices with similar defective characteristics.