
ON Semiconductor to Acquire Fairchild Semiconductor for $2.4B in Cash - iliis
http://www.onsemi.com/PowerSolutions/newsItem.do?article=3452
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jimmyswimmy
It's an interesting combination. ON would become the predominant manufacturer
of discretes. There's still competition at IR, Vishay and Infineon (and ST if
you can get past their horrible datasheets). But it doesn't really add to
their portfolio, just takes away a competitor.

I haven't done the math but it doesn't seem like a great deal or a good plan.

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thrownaway2424
Doesn't Vishay own IR (and everybody else)? What about the Japanese (Hitachi,
Toshiba, Sanyo, Panasonic) are they in the game?

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WallWextra
Infineon owns IR.

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thrownaway2424
My mistake. The SKUs I used to order from IRF are now sold by Vishay.

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hwstar
First, National Semiconductor buys Fairchild Semiconductor, then spits then
out before they are acquired by TI, now On Semiconductor wants to work them
over. These mergers and acquisitions tell me that the epoch of non-linear
growth is over in the semiconductor industry.

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bsder
It's a couple of things.

First, cell phones ate _EVERYTHING_. So, the only volume is in cell phones.
Cell phones only need a few different _types_ of chips but they need them in
_massive_ quantities.

Second, the cost of creating a chip is too high. The "maker" culture relies on
the fact that creating a PCB is _cheap_. Between the cost for EDA VLSI tools
and the NRE for creating a mask set, you blow $100K before you even get
started making a chip. I suspect that we probably have the ability to
digitally image 1.0um or larger features so we don't have to cut a mask set,
but it's a chicken/egg problem. Since nobody wants 1.0um+ processes anymore,
nobody will develop the technology for them, so nobody will design for them,
so nobody will want 1.0um+ processes.

Third, modern fab capacity is _ridiculous_. A _single_ 300mm wafer can produce
_70,000_ 1mm^2 chips or 700 1cm^2 (a big chip nowadays). How many customers
can consume those kinds of volumes?

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mbell
> First, cell phones ate EVERYTHING. So, the only volume is in cell phones.

Not sure where your getting this. The MCU market dwarfs the cellular market,
last time I looked it was on the order of 25B MCUs sold per year and the
majority are still 8bit MCU. There are only ~1B cell phones produced per year.
I don't think the discrete market is really all that driven by cell phones.

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bsder
The problem with you argument is that 8-bit MCU's are a _rounding error_.

The Cortex A series cores are around 2mmx2mm. The Cortex M series are
something like .2mmx.2mm. It looks like my 10mmx10mm comment was way off.

So, let's assume that the 8-bit MCU's are .1mmx.1mm. That's probably _WAY_ too
big, but let's start somewhere. That means that you can fit 7,000,000 on a
wafer. For roughly 3,500 wafers for the entire, worldwide capacity of embedded
MCU's.

The entire, worldwide, _annual_ market for MCU's is _3,500_ silicon wafers per
year. That's the same number of wafer starts that a big fab has _IN A WEEK_.

And that was 2008.
[http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1169357](http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1169357)

Modern fabs can pump out a million a week: electroiq.com/blog/2014/01/tsmc-
samsung-and-micron-top-list-of-ic-industry-capacity-leaders/

This is why everybody wants to produce bigger chips like SOC's and why Intel
will never switch to ARM until it's about to go under. If your chip is too
small, you can't move enough to fill your fab _even if you give them away
free_.

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nascentmind
What will be the impact of this on jobs? I see a lot of layoffs in the
semiconductor industry. I don't know what is the impact on jobs for a firmware
engineer. I don't see anything new coming soon in the embedded space and IoT
looks like more of a hype than anything else.

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bsder
> I don't know what is the impact on jobs for a firmware engineer.

Moore's Law slowing down is _good_ for firmware people. Optimizing, by hand,
for 10% matters when you can't just get a factor of 2 automatically every 18
months.

> I don't see anything new coming soon in the embedded space and IoT looks
> like more of a hype than anything else.

The embedded space is power and cost constrained. Power constrained because of
batteries and their inability to deal with RF. Cost constrained because memory
now makes up 75% plus of chip area which defines the cost.

IoT _is_ a lot of hype. The problem is that IoT is _LOW VOLUME_ , and nobody
wants to deal with that. So, everybody wants you to adopt their "highly
scalable" (har har) backend and extract rent from the people doing the real
work who are creating and marketing the application device. And, everybody
decent at producing devices is also smart enough to realize that the money is
in the backend so they refuse to play along.

The company that is willing to slog through the swamp of low volume will be
the one who stumbles into the high volume application. Think Qualcomm getting
started by tracking trucks and stumbling into cellular phones.

