The mobile semiconductor industry appears poised for consolidation.
Japan’s troubled Renesas is considering a sale of the chip making business it bought from Nokia three years ago. Reuters reports that the firm will most likely go to a buyer from outside Japan. Renesas paid $200 million for the unit, which has been part of its wholly-owned Renesas Mobile subsidiary. The business has been unable to keep pace with American competitors like Qualcomm and Broadcom, and has been stung by the decline of Nokia, a primary customer.
ST-Ericsson, also reeling from Nokia’s difficulties in the smartphone space, said this week that it will dissolve and distribute its assets to its parent companies, Ericsson and STMicroelectronics. The shutdown will cost 1,600 jobs, on top of 1,700 previously announced layoffs.
Renesas and ST-Ericsson both make chipsets based on ARM’s architecture. There are a number of companies combining ARM cores into faster and more powerful chipsets, but that number may be shrinking. ARM’s technology has been wildly successful for mobile devices, and since a large part of a chip’s value is in the ARM core, chipmakers end up competing largely on price and on their ability to integrate chipsets.
ARM itself is in transition; the British company is installing a new CEO as it pushes to expand beyond mobile devices into servers and wireless infrastructure. Simon Segars, head of ARM’s American operation, will replace Warren East in July. East has had tremendous success at ARM and analysts think he’s just ready to retire or look for a new challenge.
ARM’s archrival Intel is also in the process of replacing its CEO, although Paul Otellini’s successor has not yet been chosen. This week the company announced a move into set-top boxes, launching a hardware and software toolkit that it says will help OEMs bring these devices to market faster. Set-top boxes are seen as one of the drivers of semiconductor growth, along with smartphones, tablets, and automobiles. Intel sees a need for “smarter” set-top boxes as consumers demand more gaming capabilities from their televisions.
Gaming is Nvidia’s bread-and-butter, and now the inventor of the graphics processing unit chipset is describing a future in which GPUs will share memory and power with the central processing units of mobile devices. Nvidia has already launched its own CPU, Tegra, calling it the “world’s fastest mobile processor,” and this week it said that within five years it will be able to achieve a 100-fold increase in the processor’s speed.
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