Most Read articles – Panasonic exit, Intel Connectivity, RISC-V relocation

Time once again to see what are the five most popular articles on ElectronicsWeekly.com that were written in the last week, according to the objective truth of Google Analytics. See what your peers have been reading recently.

There’s the historic news of Panasonic exiting the semiconductor industry, Intel looking to sell its Home Connectivity group, the RISC-V Foundation moving away from the US to Switzerland and the battle between front-end wafer processing equipment suppliers…

5. OSAT market may be on the turn
The decline in the outsourced assembly and test (OSAT) industry showed signs of a gradual halt in 3Q19, says TrendForce, since the drop in memory prices began to slow down, and smartphone sales steadily recovered. The top ten OSAT providers posted a total revenue of $6 billion in 3Q19, a 10.1% growth YoY and 18.7% growth QoQ, indicating that the market as a whole is on its way to recovery.

4. Panasonic quits chips
After 67 years Matsushita/Panasonic is quitting the chip industry. Between 1985 and 1990 the company was a top ten player. Now it is to be sold to Nuvoton Technology of Taiwan which is 61% owned by Winbond. Nuvoton is paying $250 million for the unit which designs power-management chips and sensors for smartphones, cars and security cameras. For its FY ending in March, Panasonic Semiconductor made a loss of $215m on sales of $840m.

3. Intel looking to sell home connectivity unit
Intel has hired a financial company to find a buyer for its home connectivity group, reports Bloomberg. The group makes chips for home gateways and routers where it competes with Qualcomm and Broadcom. Sales of the group are said to be about $450 million annually. Intel has been in and out of many attempted diversifications: watches, mobile APs, PLDs, ASICs, XScale, LCOS, WiMAX, CLECs, VOIP, STB, wearables, AR glasses and, now, home connectivity.

2. RISC-V Foundation moves to Switzerland
The four year-old RISC-V Foundation is moving from Delaware to Switzerland to allay foreign members’ fears of possible disruption to their continued development of the open-source technology. Although the non-profit foundation does not own the technology, Calista Redmond the foundation’s chief executive, says foreign members of the foundation have said they’d be ‘more comfortable’ if the foundation was not incorporated in the US.

1. Applied to lose front-end equipment crown to ASML
Applied Materials which has been the world’s largest supplier of front-end wafer processing equipment for nearly 30 years is about to be overtaken by ASML says The Information Network. “Applied Materials, which has been losing market share in the wafer front end (WFE) equipment market for the past three years, is poised to lose its lead in 2019,” says The Information Network’s president Robert Castellano (pictured) “ASML will take over the lead on the strength of its shipments of pricy EUV lithography equipment.”