ARM Acquires Carbon ARM announced that it had acquired Carbon Design Systems. They were one of the remaining independent virtual platform companies. They started focused on accelerating RTL models by throwing away detail, resulting in much faster C-based model that they described as "carbonized". When ARM wanted to get out of the commercial side of providing models, they licensed their fast models to Carbon, along with some technology that they had previously acquired with Axys. Carbon's unique capability was that they could run fast models up to a certain point, save the state, and then switch to the carbonized RTL model to get a lot more detail. In particular, you could boot an operating system very fast and then do much more accurate modeling to, for example, debug a device driver or the memory cache performance. Look for my post on Breakfast Bytes next week for the story of virtual platforms. ARM Announces Quarterly Results Big picture: revenue up 17% year on year (YoY), although measured in UK pounds it is up 24%, but the dollar is strong. Processor licensing revenue up 5% YoYr. Royalties on processors up 37% YoY. Normalized profit before tax up 27% YoY and earnings per share up 29% YoY. As Simon Segars said on the earnings call, they have a dominant share in mobile (to be honest, I think the only reason it isn't 100% is because there are a few tablets not using ARM), but they need to grow in other areas. Clearly servers, networking and IoT are where they are looking. They have a small presence in networking, none in servers and a reasonable IoT position. The big opportunity, as it has been for years, is whether cloud datacenters switch to ARM due to lower power, lower cost of ownership, smaller physical size. They have some strong partners such as Qualcomm, who announced their own chip sampling recently. But this transition in the datacenters has been predicted for a long time. If it happens it will be huge, or it could end up being nothing, like people used to say about Gallium Arsenide, "it is a few years in the future...and always will be." The slides from the earnings call, a replay, the press release and more are on the ARM website here . A transcript of the call is on SeekingAlpha here . In addition, the same day, ARM announced the Mali-470, a low-power GPU core for embedded/wearable devices. ARM claims a 2X improvement in energy efficiency relative to the older Mali-400, as well as a 10% smaller area and lower power. Lam Research Acquires KLA-Tencor Semiconductor equipment manufacturer Lam Research acquired KLA-Tencor, who are primarily a semiconductor metrology company. Or as USA Today described it, "Chip maker Lam Research acquires KLA-Tencor for $10.6B". To me a company like Intel is a chip maker, not Lam, who make the equipment that makes the chips, but I guess if you are a headline writer that is a distinction too far. Moody's is predicting that due to the growth rates of their markets, they will soon overtake Applied Materials to become the biggest equipment manufacturer: The combination will create the second largest semiconductor equipment company behind Applied Materials. As a result of Lam and KLA market positions, growth prospects and margins, we project the combined entity's 2017 projected revenue ($10.8 billion) will exceed Applied Materials ($10.7 billion). Western Digital Buys SanDisk Western Digital, who make disk drives, bought SanDisk, who make flash memories, for $19B. The transition away from rotating disks (HDD) towards flash memory-based disks (SSD) is going very fast. In order not to become the "Kodak" of the disk drive industry, a leader in the old technology but wrong-footed by a transition to semiconductors, they are getting their own source of flash. SanDisk supplies other markets, most notably smartphones in general and Appie in particular. Apple is large enough that SanDIsk have to talk about it on their earnings calls, since they are 20% of their revenue and increasing. SanDisk has a major technology partnership with Toshiba and have at least one jointly owned fab. Flash is going through its own transition, to vertical flash with the bits stacked vertically and a huge number of process steps required during manufacture.![]()
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