Sales from U.S. semiconductor firms captured more than 51 percent of total global semiconductor sales in 2014, by far the greatest share of any single country. The next highest country was Korea followed by Japan. The United States is one of the best, IP-secure environments in the world. The semiconductor industry is the most highly R&D intensive industry in the world and semiconductor manufacturing must be done in a secure IP environment. The United States has one of the world’s most talented work forces to meet challenging manufacturing jobs.
In order to understand the USA’s Semiconductor companies, we have gathered the first-hand information to highlight their future goals, demand, market and more:
Digi-key Electronics
An electronics components distributor, fourth largest in North America and the fifth largest in the world. Digi-Key has invested heavily in their digital platforms to support everyone working from home and will continue to do so with additional search and shopping functionality, expanded localization efforts, and many new resources and tools for engineers. From a semiconductor perspective, the semiconductor industry has large exposure throughout the automotive industry.
Digi-key is currently working on wireless as they been very strong, micro controllers, and sensor-type products that have been used to support many medical applications have also been in high demand. The need to support home infrastructure, medical applications, networking and data centers, the growing industrial marketplace, the emergence of newer and higher-end IoT applications, the focus on wireless technologies and the need to support automotive, especially the electrification component of automotive, as well are the areas of R&D currently.
Many technology startups reside in India to support design. The government is working with major companies to offer significant tax incentives, so there is a strong government backing. Moreover, over the past 5-10 years, many Tier 1 OEMs have moved into India with significant research and design labs. The company believes that the future of semiconductor industries will be all about continuous merger and acquisition activity into both semiconductor and non-semiconductor technologies. In addition, the supplier community will continue to diversify their factories from a geographic perspective and not be so dependent in one localized area.
element 14
An Avnet Company, distributor of products for electronic system design, maintenance and repair operating in 28 countries across Europe along with Belgium and UK. The company mentions an increase in digitization in all aspects of personal and business lives from working at home to shopping at home, and purchasing online and a subsequent boost in all the infrastructure technologies that facilitate this from personal computers and laptops to servers.
The demand for electronics and ICs is growing across 5G infrastructure, charging piles for electric vehicles, big data centres, artificial intelligence, industrial IoT and smart city. Most supply chains are well founded and usually work effectively, however, when something such as a worldwide health crisis occurs, weaknesses can be exposed and true flexibility is required. Today, the challenge of managing supply chains is made considerably more difficult by the fact that the COVID-19 virus introduced significant unpredictability and the lessons of COVID-19 will live with us long beyond the virus itself.
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the industry severely due to its dependence on China and other Asian markets and has highlighted the susceptibility and potential risks of today’s electronics value chain. Nevertheless, India also seems to be punching below its weight on the electronics world stage and with manufacturers increasingly seeking multi- sourced supply chains, there is broader potential for India to become a bigger player if it can deliver on quality and price.
NXP Semiconductors
World’s biggest automotive chip supplier, which creates solutions that enable secure connections for a smarter world, operating in more than 25 countries. The company is working diligently with direct and distribution partners to determine accurate projections of customer demand, especially within the global automotive and industrial markets. NXP continues to have the financial strength, the product portfolio and customer engagements to emerge strong from the current unpredictable environment. For the first quarter, auto and communications revenues were down 4% and 10% respectively compared to a year earlier. Mobile, industrial, and IoT revenues were both up 2%.
NXP sees the Internet of Things (IoT) as billions of intelligent connections that will encompass every aspect of our lives and make our world smarter, greener and safer. NXP are a market leader in micro controllers with a broad portfolio of ARM-based MCUs with a low power, high security and small footprint – ideal for IoT anf are leader in IoT infrastructure with embedded processors for wired and wireless applications.
NXP Semiconductors remains confident about its prospects in the China market, after the company reported a growth in most of its local businesses since the beginning of the second quarter this year. NXP’s industrial internet of things businesses have benefited the most from China’s reviving economic activities and are set to post continuous growth from the first quarter into the second quarter.
Broadcom Inc
The company is a designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software product. The weak demand for wireless semiconductors as the uncertainty caused by the coronavirus takes its toll on smartphone sales, forcing one of its large customers to delay the launch of its latest phone. However, that the weakness will be balanced out by a boom in its core networking chip business.
Looking ahead, our third quarter guidance in semiconductors reflects a surge in demand from cloud, telecom, and enterprise customers, offset by supply chain constraints and an expected substantial reset in wireless and clearly sees significant puts and takes.
Broadcom plans to wring out at least $2.5 billion per year in operating profit from CA Technologies — up substantially from the $1.12 billion that it generated on its own during its fiscal year 2018. Over time, Broadcom’s future acquisitions to be focused more on building out its infrastructure software business by buying best-in-breed software companies, cutting out as much operating expense as it possibly can, and integrating those entities with its current infrastructure software operations. Trade tensions have caused a “compression of the supply chain. Around 50% of Broadcom’s revenue in 2018 came from China, which imports more chips than any other country in the world.
India is a key market for us and our Bangalore centre is doing important work around wireless, networking and video technologies, which is about 75 per cent of our company’s profile. They are investing in creating local teams and support as well as building a partner ecosystem to help innovators. India is the largest base for us.
Micron
The company designs and manufactures semiconductors and wireless telecommunications product. The company is uniquely positioned to accelerate 5G across all points of the 5G spectrum from the cloud and data center to the enterprise, to networking, and to the smart devices at the network edge. Micron is also working with ecosystem partners to develop a smart car application-specific version of Micron’s deep learning accelerator (DLA) technology designed to be flexible and scalable while delivering the low power and high performance needed for an agile edge-inference solution that uses machine learning.
Micron focuses on providing key building blocks for all types of industrial automation systems that comprise of sensors, analog/digital I/Os, and actuators. The accomplishment of the company’s R&D clean-room space marks a significant acceleration of the innovation capabilities the company is pushing. The government schemes coupled with investments taking place in the infrastructure for transportation, availability of land, power, and water, regulatory approvals for new projects will continue to add to the attractiveness of the country as a manufacturing hub.
