The 12 families on Thursday joined the “Giving Pledge,” following 81 other billionaire families that have committed publicly to give away their wealth under the pledge, which was established in June 2010 by Microsoft Corp.’s founder, Gates, and Warren Buffett, chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.

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So far, the launch hasn’t gone quite so well. First there was a lackluster review. Then, days after going on sale on Easter Sunday, the company has admitted to a software glitch and is offering people who bought one a $100 credit in addition to a software patch. The credit makes the phone free to buyers willing to take a two-year service contract.

Now the market research firm IHS iSuppli has taken a Lumia 900 apart and, in a report shared with AllThingsD that will be released later today, has determined that it costs Nokia about $209 to build. And, judging from the parts being used, it’s not exactly built like the most cutting-edge phone on the market.

In fact, it seems like Microsoft and wireless chipmaker Qualcomm are both making an effort to showcase how efficient Windows Phone 7 for mobile can be; at the same time, they seem to be aiming to entice other hardware manufacturers by demonstrating that a full-featured smartphone can be built using components that are about a generation behind the current high end, and therefore cheaper, says Andrew Rassweiler, the iSuppli analyst who supervised the teardown.

For example, the teardown found that the Lumia 900 uses a single-core Qualcomm chip that costs $17 as its main applications processor; a phone with similar features running Google’s Android OS, such as Samsung’s Galaxy SII Skyrocket, uses a higher-end dual-core processor that costs $22.

“It appears what Microsoft and Qualcomm and Nokia are trying to do here — and this is being driven by Microsoft more than anyone else — is streamline the OS so it can run on a lighter processing platform,” Rassweiler told me. “The point being is to undercut the higher end phones.”

The choices don’t end with the processor. The phone contains only 512 megabytes of DRAM memory, where most phones would use one gigabyte. And the trend is expected to continue, as the next generation of Microsoft’s mobile OS will require even less memory.

Another example: The Bluetooth chip. Nokia is using a slightly older chip from Broadcom, and not the latest, greatest Bluetooth part. The difference between them is only $2.50, but it serves as another example showing that Nokia is aiming to compete on price.

For Nokia, the strategy seems to be one of aiming to compete against other phones on price, while offering similar features. The Lumia is thought to sell for $450 at retail without a subsidy, or about $200 lower than Apple’s iPhone 4S, which starts at $649 without a contract, depending on model, and costs between $188 and $245 to build.

Microsoft is also thought to be helping Nokia out, says iSuppli’s Wayne Lam, who also participated in the teardown analysis. While software costs are not considered in a teardown analysis, he says Microsoft is thought to be making less than $5 per phone in licensing fees on the Windows Phone 7 operating system, far lower than the $15 per device it is said to want. That would be in line with the $3 per phone price that Nokia is thought to have paid in licensing fees for the Symbian OS it used previously, and of which it was a partial owner. “Nokia is getting a fantastic discount,” Lam told me.

One place where Nokia didn’t skimp? The gyroscope chip, which determines how the phone is being moved. It contains the same gyroscope chip from STMicroelectronics that goes into the iPhone 4S. There are, apparently, some things on which you simply can’t compromise.

Those aren’t the only players, though. Samsung and Huawei make some of their own chips, while Intel is also going after this market. Quietly making inroads as well is Broadcom.

The Orange County, Calif., chipmaker has long made Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other communications chips for phones. In recent months, though, it has been able to capture a sizeable chunk of the main processor market, thanks to its chip, which combines an application processor with another key component, the communications baseband.

“Smartphones have become a significant business for Broadcom,” Broadcom CEO Scott McGregor told AllThingsD in an interview last week.

McGregor declined to get specific, but a recent J.P. Morgan report estimated that Broadcom’s baseband and application processor is now in roughly a third of Samsung’s smartphones, which it says represents three to four times what the company was doing as recently as the second half of this year.

Among the models using Broadcom’s chips are the Galaxy Y, Galaxy Mini and Galaxy Ace, J.P. Morgan said, projecting sales of about 12 million to 13 million phones per quarter, which it says could translate into $500 million in annual revenue.

Broadcom, it notes, also has about 70 percent share with most of the major smartphone and tablet makers for the chips needed to do Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. The new iPad, for example, uses Broadcom’s chips, according to an IHS iSuppli teardown of the tablet.

“Over the next few years, Broadcom should emerge as one of the top players in the mobile/cellular semiconductor market,” J.P. Morgan’s analysts said in their report.

Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair said he left last month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona even more positive than he had been on Broadcom’s prospects.

“We have said that we believe that the biggest trend of the decade is the low-end smartphone,” Blair said in a research note. “One of the most surprising elements of this trend is how good the entry level models have become, and one of the reasons for this is Broadcom.”

Blair said that even phones that sell for $150 unsubsidized are now capable of doing what a high-end smartphone did just two years ago. The phones powered typically have a 1GHz processor and baseband and other communications and power management chips, all of which can add up to devices with $20 to $22 worth of Broadcom silicon, assuming it has all of its chips inside.

Historically, the chipmaker has mainly gone after the midrange of the market, but McGregor promised that the company will move into higher-end devices this year, as well as a bit down-market.

“We’ll cover the whole waterfront,” McGregor said. He acknowledged that the company had some catching up to do in application processors and high-end modems, such as those used in 4G phones.

Android has grown considerably, he said, though he still sees some room for other operating systems, particularly now the Microsoft has managed to get several phone makers to pay a royalty on every Android device they sell.

“One of the challenges of Android is that Microsoft is now hitting up all of the handset makers and claiming a corkage free on that dinner,” McGregor said. “I think that’s an interesting challenge for the handset industry.”

The analysts at the market research firm IHS iSuppli, considered by the investment community to be the most reliable of the organizations that conduct teardowns, were among that set. Today, somewhere in Southern California, an iSuppli analyst stood in line at a store and promptly took an iPad to a lab, where it was torn into, initiating the interesting process of estimating what it all cost to build.

Here’s what iSuppli’s team found: First off, there weren’t many changes from the last iPad, in terms of suppliers. “It’s most of the same characters we saw last time around,” analyst Andrew Rassweiler told me today. Wireless chipmakers Qualcomm and Broadcom both reappeared — Qualcomm supplying a baseband processor chip, Broadcom a Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chip, TriQuint Semiconductor suppling some additional wireless parts. STMicroelectronics once again retained its position supplying the gyroscope. Cirrus Logic supplied an audio codec chip.

The 16 gigabyte, Wi-Fi-only iPad that sells for $499 costs about $316 to make, or about 63 percent of the device’s retail price. On the upper end, the 4G-ready 64GB model that sells for $829 costs about $409 to make, or about 49 percent of the retail price.

The new cost figures represent an increase of between 21 percent and 25 percent, depending on the model, from the iPad 2, which iSuppli tore down last year.

So what did they find inside? An expensive Samsung display, for one thing. All those millions of pixels don’t come cheap. ISuppli analyst Andrew Rassweiler estimates that the display, which cost $57 on the iPad 2, has grown in cost to $87 on the latest iPad.

Rassweiler says that two other vendors, LG Display and Sharp Electronics, have inked display supply deals with Apple for the latest iPad, but only Samsung is thought to have fully ramped up production. Depending on the vendor, the display may cost as much as $90, he said.

One set of components remained essentially the same as before: Those that drive the touchscreen capabilities. Rassweiler says that three Taiwanese companies, TPK, Wintek and Chi Mei, supply parts related to driving the central interface feature of the new iPad, but he says to expect a major shift in how Apple handles the touch interface on future iPads.

The combined cost of cameras, including the front-facing and back camera, is pegged at $12.35, more than three times the cost of cameras found on the iPad 2, Rassweiler says. But it’s essentially the same setup as that on the iPhone 4, he says. As has been the case with cameras, the identity of the supplier wasn’t easy to determine because they try hard to hide identifying information from the prying eyes of teardown analysts. The candidates, however, include Largan Precision Co., a Taiwanese supplier of camera modules to wireless phone companies, and Omnivision. On the iPhone 4S, a research firm called Chipworks identified the supplier of the CMOS sensor in one of the cameras as having come from Sony.

As with other Apple devices, the main processor chip is an Apple-made A5X processor, one manufactured under contract by Samsung. The estimated cost of that chip is $23, up from $14 on the iPad 2.

Another part that’s more expensive than on the last iPad, but also better for a variety of reasons, is the battery. This one is estimated to have cost Apple $32, up from $25 on the iPad 2. But it constitutes a significant upgrade, Rassweiler says, with 70 percent more capacity than before. Apple benefited in part by lower prices in the lithium polymer material used to make the battery, offsetting the cost of adding a vastly improved battery.

ISuppli wasn’t the only outfit conducting teardowns of the iPad today. An enthusiast site called iFixit that encourages consumers to learn how to repair and upgrade their own electronics, flew technicians to Australia to conduct its own teardown analysis.

Things are good for ARM Holdings, the British chip company whose designs are central to so many of the chips that make modern life modern. In 2011, some 7.9 billion chips with ARM cores in them were shipped. And yet it’s not a very big company. Where Intel clocked sales of $54 billion, ARM finished the year with sales of $777 million (491.8 million pounds). It all has to do with the differences in how they do business. ARM sells the blueprints to make a core — the central brain of a chip — and then those who buy that blueprint can build their own custom parts of a chip around it.

That means an ARM-based chip from Samsung can be significantly different from an ARM chip from Broadcom or Nvidia. And yet designers from either company could probably exchange jobs, because they’re both familiar with the basic designs. ARM has become something of a lingua franca of electronics design, except in the world of personal computers and servers. Yet with Microsoft set to release a new ARM-friendly version of Windows for notebooks and tablets, and the chip firm Calxeda working on bringing ARM chips to servers, ARM’s influence is growing.

I caught up with ARM CEO Warren East over dinner in New York last week, and we talked about how its business model is going strong, and where the ARM architecture is going.

AllThingsD: When people ask me what ARM is, I tend to liken it to a recipe for cake — a cake for which you buy the basic recipe, but which you can then enhance anyway you like. Is that a fair analogy?

East: Exactly, and the doing whatever you like is very important for our business model. If you couldn’t, and we were like Intel, say, and you had to do this one thing, the only thing our licensees could — if you were to apply a licensing model to that — the only thing they could use to compete against each other is price. Whereas this way, they can do their own stuff around the basic recipe, they can differentiate. But because it’s the same microprocessor architecture, your cake recipe, then investments they make in software, or if you’re using a combination of chips from Samsung and Nivida and Qualcomm, any investment you make toward using Samsung chips is equally applicable to the others.

And you can switch to another vendor later if you like, correct?

You can, because they all do different things. If your product is about video, then Texas Instruments’ video accelerator is very good. If it’s about 3-D graphics, then Nvidia’s chips are very good. If it’s a modem you need, then Qualcomm’s chip is very good. So you can mix and match.

And it’s not uncommon for many manufacturers, whether they’re making phones or something else, to have several ARM-based chips doing many things. In a phone, the main microprocessor will be an ARM-based chip, but then also the surrounding chips doing specialized functions will be ARM chips, as well, correct?

Right. The typical smartphone will have four or five ARM chips in it. There’s the main processor, the thing you interact with as the user. Then there’s the modem, which connects to the phone network. And then there’s a connectivity processor that handles the Bluetooth and the Wi-Fi or both. And then there may be a power management processor, or a touchscreen controller, a camera, or GPS, and so on. And the next one that’s being integrated is NFC, or Near Field Communications, for payments by phone. And your 8-bit processor in the SIM card is turning into a 32-bit microprocessor, and that will likely be an ARM, as well.

When you think about competitors, who is it? Is it MIPS? Is it Intel, perhaps, down the road?

When you think about the consumer electronics space, TVs and the like, MIPS has been very strong in that space. Increasingly, as the TVs become smarter and more connected then they start to look more and more like a smartphone with a 46-inch screen. And so, actually, the infrastructure that exists around ARM makes it very compelling to put an ARM chip in there. In the computing world then, the competition is really Intel and AMD x86 chips.

Speaking of AMD, its CEO, Rory Read, raised some eyebrows at its analyst meeting recently when he mentioned ARM and described a new “ambidextrous” approach to its chips, implying, many think, that AMD might combine its x86 cores in some way with an ARM core. Can you give any visibility into what he might mean?

We can’t tell you really anything about it. But I will say something that we’ve said about this before, when people had picked up similar noises about something like this. AMD is in the business of selling microprocessors. We’re in the business of selling microprocessor designs. We wouldn’t be doing our job properly if we weren’t at least talking to them. And so we have been, for the last 10 years or so. If those discussions go anywhere, and if and when there’s something to announce to the world, we’ll do so.

How many licensees are there? Are there any that surprise you because they’re unusual or unique?

Now there are 290 licensees. It’s a good question, and one we don’t get very often. There are all sorts of weird applications. There’s a glaucoma monitor chip that’s a cubic millimeter. It’s a pressure sensor, a solar panel, a microprocessor and a radio and a battery, all in that space, so it can be fitted inside the eye so you can be tested for glaucoma. On the other extreme, we’re in a neutrino detector that’s in a kilometers-long chain of sensors, with another sensor every few meters, down in the Antarctic. So we’re in applications that are as small as a cubic millimeter to as large as several square kilometers. Looking forward, one of the ones I’m intrigued about at the moment is with a company that makes concrete. The idea is it concerns networks of sensors that would be embedded directly in the concrete. But you get the feeling that one company is going to pour the concrete and another is going to place the sensors. But this company wants to put the sensors in in the first place. We’ll just pour the concrete with the sensors already there. It’s all about energy harvesting from the vibrations in the concrete. The processors come with little wireless communications [abilities], and use hardly any energy, because the communication is only from one sensor to the next. That one is probably a few years off, but the fact that a concrete company is thinking about this is very interesting.

The next big thing is that ARM chips are coming to traditional PCs running Windows. We’ve been hearing about it for more than a year now, and Microsoft is starting to show Windows 8. Is the opportunity for ARM in PCs real, and is it going to happen?

It’s real and it’s going to happen, and it’s absolutely on track. Obviously, the detailed timeline is a matter for Microsoft and not for us. Metro is happening. It’s a big change to the user interface. They have pioneered Metro in their mobile offering, and you can sort of see where they’re going with it. But Windows 8 is going to be about Metro. That lends itself a little more to tablets in a way that they haven’t been before. That is clearly going to happen. For us and for Microsoft there are two different objectives. For them, it’s about getting a route to support the billions of Internet-connected screens that are going to appear over the next decade or so. Most of them are going to have an ARM processor in them. Without Windows on ARM, Microsoft is excluded from those products, so they need Windows on ARM. For us, a great side effect is getting into the PC world where, outside of Apple, Windows is everything, and it has been inextricably linked to Intel and x86. So now if Windows appears on ARM, we can address those 300 million PCs that are sold each year. And for us, it’s like having an extra 300 million smartphones. It’s certainly nice to have.

A start-up called Tilera today unveiled a chip it calls the TILE-Gx. Essentially, it’s a super-chip with 36 cores which — so the company claims — beats a traditional Intel server chip on the key metric of performance per watt.

For those who don’t keep score in the arcane world of semiconductors, I’ll revisit some of the basics of the above paragraph. We all know that Intel and its one main rival, Advanced Micro Devices, sell chips for servers. Those chips, and those that go into PCs, are generally known as x86 chips, a name derived from the instruction set they share.

On the other hand, there are ARM chips, which are a different breed, and exist in a very different ecosystem. Scores of companies make ARM-based chips for all kinds of different uses, and they license the basics of the designs from ARM, the company, which last year did $636 million in revenue.

ARM chips show up in phones and tablets from the likes of Broadcom, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia, but not so much in PCs and servers. ARM is even the basis for Apple’s A4 and A5 chips. At CES last year, Microsoft said it would create a version of Windows 8 that will support ARM chips. And a company called Calxeda (which I initially got mixed up with Tilera) is aiming to bring ARM cores to chips running in servers.

Tilera, based in San Jose, Calif., is backed by investments from Bessemer Venture Partners, Walden International, Columbia Capital and VentureTech Alliance; plus a trio of strategic investors, Quanta Computer, NTT Finance and Broadcom. Its new chip is based around an entirely new architecture developed by Tilera’s CTO Anant Agarwal, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It forgoes both the traditional x86 and ARM architectures. Aimed squarely at servers, its intention is to get the same work done that a traditional Intel server chip does, while using less power to do it.

That’s not a trivial benefit, especially in data center environments where servers are bunched together and pushed to the performance limit. The biggest operational expense in running them is going to be power. So it’s on this point that server vendors and chip vendors obsess over saving a watt here and there — over the machine’s useful lifetime, the costs will add up considerably.

How it does this is what makes it interesting. Essentially, the cores on the chip do something that an Intel chip can’t do: They communicate among themselves. The way I understand it — and I admit I’m simplifying it greatly — the cores on an x86 chip rely on a single communications channel, called the Bus, to communicate. The Tilera architecture allows each core to communicate directly with the other cores, thus eliminating the need for the Bus and cutting back on the need for power.

The top-end chip — there are two versions — has 36 cores. A core is essentially the main computing engine on a chip. If you’re reading this on a PC, chances are the chip inside it has two cores, maybe four. It used to be that chips had only one core, until it became logical to put two or more on a single chip. I’ve always compared multicore chips to roommates folding laundry together. When there’s a big pile of laundry to be folded, one person can certainly do it, but two or four get it done faster and with less effort. Multicore chips basically prove the old adage that many hands make for fast work.

There’s an obvious appeal to a chip like this, but there are a lot of strikes against it. First, much of the server ecosystem is pretty well entrenched. Companies run what applications they already have, and are usually loath to mess with their computing environments much. Changing the architecture of the CPU chip inside the servers is about as major a decision as a CIO may ever make, and one they don’t make lightly. First they’ll have to test it and run it for awhile, and then see how it interacts with other systems. It’s not the sort of decision that happens just overnight. Also, a new architecture brings with it a lot of software compatibility questions that will give many IT departments pause.

Meanwhile, Intel, which sells chips that go into most of the world’s mainstream servers, will continue to push its power consumption down. At the same time, it’s been trying like crazy to use its Atom line of chips to mount an attack on ARM’s territory and win business from phone and tablet vendors. That effort is just now seeing its first early successes. If there’s a great long-term story in chips that bears watching, the grappling between Intel and the ever-expanding universe of ARM vendors is certainly it.

Correction: I initially thought the Tilera chip was based on the ARM architecture. I’ve revised the story to correct that.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Intel is showing a working reference design that it is offering to any phone maker that wants to use its chips. The phone itself packs a 1.6GHz single-core Atom chip along with an array of sensors and radios.

“The sample platform we have is fully buzzword compliant,” General Manager Mike Bell said in an interview.

The company has been testing thousands of phones internally and says the performance is top of class, with battery life at least as good as most Android devices.

“We are not the best at power, but we are definitely very, very competitive,” Bell said.

Compatibility is another issue that Bell said he is asked about a lot. Nearly all Java-based Android apps should run, as well as a good number of those designed specifically for chips based on cores from rival ARM.

“We think that gets rid of the last argument people have,” Bell said.

Of course, Intel faces plenty of competition in the phone chip space, including existing Android chip providers Qualcomm, Nvidia, Texas Instruments and other challengers, such as Broadcom.

Intel is announcing two phone customers running its chips — a Lenovo phone for China slated to be released in the first half of the year and a multi-year, multi-device alliance with Motorola Mobility that will begin with a phone in the second half of the year.

Although Intel announced only the two customers, Bell indicated more names will be coming soon. (Think next month’s Mobile World Congress for an update.)

“You can imagine our business is all about scale,” he said, declining to say how many phone designs are being built around its chips, or how many customers it has.

In a roundtable with reporters, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha said he was attracted to the chipmaker by both its roadmap and its approach, which focuses as much on running multiple instructions on a single chip core as it does on packing in as many cores as possible.

“What they have done is multithreading vs. multicore,” Jha said, noting there is a big debate in computer science as to which is better. Jha said that, along with other innovations like three-dimensional transistors, this will be important as the laws of physics prevent rapid performance gains just by shrinking the size of transistors.

Intel has focused its phone efforts entirely on Android for now, noting that it believes it has more people working on Android than Google does.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120110/intel-shows-just-how-it-plans-to-get-into-phones-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110912/broadcom-buys-netlogic/ http://allthingsd.com/20110912/broadcom-buys-netlogic/#comments Mon, 12 Sep 2011 14:30:44 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=119583 Wireless chipmaker Broadcom has agreed to buy communications processor company NetLogic Microsystems. Price: $3.7 billion in cash, or about $50 per share — a 57 percent premium over NetLogic’s closing price on Friday.

The acquisition, which will more than double Broadcom’s addressable market in network infrastructure and extend its reach in the 4G chip space, is the company’s 47th since its founding in 1991. It’s also the fourth-largest acquisition of a U.S. chipmaker in the past five years.

“The premium is fair,” said Broadcom CEO Scott McGregor. “This acquisition expands our market into additional networking opportunities.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110912/broadcom-buys-netlogic/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110703/hps-touchpad-teardown-its-deepest-secrets-revealed/ http://allthingsd.com/20110703/hps-touchpad-teardown-its-deepest-secrets-revealed/#comments Sun, 03 Jul 2011 21:26:41 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=94147

What would the release of a headline-grabbing new consumer electronics device be without a handful of people buying them only to take them apart to see what’s going on inside?

So it goes with Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad, the webOS-based answer to the king of tablet computing, Apple’s iPad. The teardown team at market research firm IHS iSuppli picked one up only to skulk around its insides. The picture at right (which you can click to make bigger) is the exploded view of the device.

ISuppli isn’t the only place that does these teardown reports, but it’s one of the few that also estimates the combined cost of the parts and materials used to build the device. These bills of materials, or “BOM” estimates, as they’re called in industry parlance, are important indicators of the kind of profit margin a company can expect to see on a device on a per-unit basis. The BOM doesn’t take into account other costs that are impossible to estimate, such as software development, licensing of any intellectual property, distribution or marketing.

So what does the TouchPad cost to build? The teardown by iSuppli pegs the cost of the components used in the 16 gigabyte version, which sells for $499 at retail, at $306.65. Meanwhile, the 32GB version, which sells for $599, costs $328.65 to build. (The difference, obviously, is memory.) HP didn’t immediately comment on iSuppli’s findings.

As is often the case with tablets and notebooks, the display is the most expensive component in the device. In this case, HP went with a proven winner. It selected a 9.7-inch display from LG Electronics that is thought to be either identical or very similar to the LG-made display Apple used in the first-generation iPad. Andrew Rassweiler, iSuppli’s senior director for teardowns, pegged the cost at $69.

Internally speaking, the similarities to the iPad end there, Rassweiler told me. The components connected to the display that enable the touch-sensitive interface are different from those on the iPad. Where Apple has favored chips from Broadcom and Texas Instruments, HP has gone with a set of six chips from Cypress Semiconductor to control the touchscreen. It costs $11.75, which makes it one of the more expensive touchscreen driver products on the market, Rassweiler said. Additionally, materials used to build the capacitive glass assembly that overlays the LCD display cost another $63.50. All in, components related to the display come to a subtotal of $144.25, iSuppli estimates.

The next most expensive set of components is the memory. For the NAND-flash memory used for storing data, HP selected SanDisk’s iNAND chips. The iSuppli teardown reckons that HP paid $23 for 16GB, and $45 for 32GB. Samsung provided 8GB worth of system memory (DRAM) for both models, at an estimated cost of $26.

he TouchPad’s main application processor is interesting both for who made it — Qualcomm — and for what it isn’t: A full-fledged member of its Snapdragon chip family. “This appears to be a Snapdragon derivative without the baseband functions that would normally be seen on a Snapdragon,” Rassweiler told me. The chip costs $20, iSuppli estimates. Chances are a fully enabled Snapdragon chip will be used in a future model, he said.

For now, as The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg noted in his review of the TouchPad last week, the device is Wi-Fi only, but a model with the ability to connect to cellular networks is planned.

It’s also clear from the teardown, Rassweiler said, that there’s room for the addition of other components in the future. And other things are missing.

“We noticed there’s a gyroscope chip and an accelerometer, but we couldn’t find any GPS chips,” he said. “Plus, when we looked at the design we noticed there seems to be a lot of breathing room inside to add additional parts without having to change the design.” More stuff to expect from a future 3G-ready TouchPad.

Qualcomm supplied several other chips. Its newly acquired Atheros subsidiary provided the Wi-Fi chips, at a cost of $2.60, and two power management chips that cost another $5 combined. Texas Instruments supplied four chips — three related to power management and one display interface chip — that added $4.50 to the cost.

Of course, the TouchPad is not only intended to be a successful device on its own for HP, but represents a new strategic opportunity. As in, HP wants to license the webOS on the TouchPad to other manufacturers.

That makes it something of a showcase for the software’s capabilities. HP CEO Léo Apotheker discussed this possibility in his appearance last month at the ninth D: All Things Digital conference.

You can see his comments on the subject from the highlight clip below. And you can see the full interview here:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110703/hps-touchpad-teardown-its-deepest-secrets-revealed/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110525/broadcom-diagrams-the-smartphone-of-tomorrow/ http://allthingsd.com/20110525/broadcom-diagrams-the-smartphone-of-tomorrow/#comments Wed, 25 May 2011 21:16:57 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=78290 Though relatively rare on today’s smartphones, new capabilities to more easily connect to nearby devices are on the verge of becoming ubiquitous, according to Broadcom, a major supplier of wireless chips.

Among the technologies that are quickly moving to the mainstream are a new, lower power form of Bluetooth along with Wi-Fi Direct, which lets two devices talk to each other over Wi-Fi without the need to first connect through a router. Also moving from the fringes to the mainstream of the smartphone market is support for so-called Near Field Communications, technology that is most noted for allowing mobile payment, but can also provide a quick means of authentication and sharing of other types of data.

“We’re seeing a huge interest for NFC,” Broadcom Senior Vice President Michael Hurlston said on Wednesday, speaking to a group of reporters in San Francisco.

Broadcom, as CEO Scott McGregor told AllThingsD back in February, is also hard at work on chips to power both low-cost Android phones as well as on technology to improve location-based services indoors, where satellite-based approaches work less well.

The sub-$100 phone market is being further fueled by new players like China’s Huawei and ZTE that are building less expensive phones that can be sold under the carrier’s brands. “Android has certainly been something that has leveled the playing field,” Hurlston said. That trend has helped Broadcom grow its business in China, where it had been less of a strong player.

Hurlston noted that more of its business is still at the high-end of the smartphone market, an area where brands like HTC, Motorola and Apple are seeing strong growth. “The high end of the market is still growing like crazy…but that low end seems to be eating a lot into the feature phone and basic voice [phone market] and that’s very good for us as a business.”

Although battery life is a concern for Broadcom, Hurlston said that one of the challenges is that it is not as high on the request list from the wireless carriers, who have a huge role in dictating what goes into the phones, since–especially in the U.S.–they are the ones buying the phones from device makers.

“What they are most interested in are these new features,” Hurlston said.

Wi-Fi Direct, Hurlston said, should become much more common by the end of the year. “We definitely expect to see a large percentage of phones by year end become Wi-Fi Direct enabled.”

NFC and indoor location services should start to take off toward the end of this year and into the first half of next year, he said.

Another thing that is surprisingly low on the feature request list from carriers, Broadcom executives said, is demand for better voice quality, even though new 4G networks could support using some of that extra bandwidth for improved calling. “What we are not seeing is a lot of pull,” Hurlston said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110525/broadcom-diagrams-the-smartphone-of-tomorrow/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110411/intel-hits-the-oak-trail-but-has-its-eyes-on-the-cedar-trail/ http://allthingsd.com/20110411/intel-hits-the-oak-trail-but-has-its-eyes-on-the-cedar-trail/#comments Mon, 11 Apr 2011 20:06:43 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=4915 The Intel Developer Forum is getting under way this week in Beijing, which means you can probably count on some kind of response to Oracle’s prodding of Intel and Hewlett-Packard about the Itanium chip last month.

Today, however, was about the Atom chip, the other chip on which Intel has pinned such hopes yet seen little payoff as yet. The company announced that the latest version of the Atom, known till now under the codename Oak Trail, is available beginning today.

The new chip is about 60 percent smaller, meaning it consumes less power than its predecessor to get the same level of computing work accomplished. Intel says it will be capable of delivering “all day” battery life in tablets and allow for a fanless design in small notebook PCs, meaning those devices will be both cooler and quieter. Intel has also added a feature called Deeper Sleep that conserves power during periods of inactivity.

And as is often the case when Intel debuts a new chip, it also points toward the near horizon. In this case, it’s Cedar Trail, yet another version of the Atom, this one built with a bleeding-edge 32-nanometer manufacturing process, which means all the elements on the chip will be even smaller yet. Intel’s current line of PC processors, the Sandy Bridge generation, is built on the same manufacturing technology. Cedar Trail will not only be smaller, but also will sport such things as a media engine for video playback at full HD resolution of 1080p.

Tablets and smartphones to this point have been another sore spot for Intel, where chips built on the core designs of U.K.-based ARM Holdings tend to hold sway. Intel’s chips have so far suffered from a nagging need to sip precious battery power far less greedily as compared to designs of ARM-based chips from the likes of Broadcom, Qualcomm, Samsung and others.

The new chip will run on tablets running Google’s Chrome and Android operating systems; MeeGo, the smartphone platform that Intel has been working on with Nokia (though its future is in question since Nokia’s decision to embrace Windows); and Microsoft’s Windows.

Meanwhile, Intel still has a lock on the market for traditional PC and server chips, though as we all know, tablets–one in particular–have been causing all kinds of troubles for the players in that end of the market.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110411/intel-hits-the-oak-trail-but-has-its-eyes-on-the-cedar-trail/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110313/days-after-its-release-the-ipad-2-gets-the-teardown-treatment/ http://allthingsd.com/20110313/days-after-its-release-the-ipad-2-gets-the-teardown-treatment/#comments Sun, 13 Mar 2011 14:59:22 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=3943 Part of the tradition of an Apple product release is the teardown. Usually within hours of the first sales, pictures begin to emerge from the odd people who delight in taking the new gadgets apart to see what’s going on inside. The days following Friday’s release of the iPad 2 have been no different. I’ve seen two different teardowns already.

But the teardown that Wall Street and the investment community is waiting on is the one from the market research firm IHS iSuppli, whose team spent all day Saturday in a furious effort to dissemble a 32-gigabyte iPad 2 and estimate the cost that Apple paid for every component. They gave me an exclusive early look at their findings.

The point is to form a partial picture of the gross profit margin on every unit, a figure that Apple generally keeps to itself. This information is useful to investors and analysts who then factor the findings in with other assumptions they use to predict how much of a profit Apple is going to report over the next few quarters.

The headline of iSuppli’s teardown researcher is always the estimated bill-of-materials cost, which is the sum cost that it thinks Apple has paid for all the hardware inside the iPad 2. It doesn’t take into account the cost to develop software, or other things like packaging, shipping and distribution, or manufacturing.

In this case the estimates are for the 32-gigabyte, 3G version of the iPad which sells for $729, and there are two estimates, one for the AT&T version–$326.60, and one for the Verizon Wireless version–$323.35. Some of the wireless chips used in the AT&T version are a little more expensive or require an extra part. For example, on the Verizon version, GPS is integrated with the Qualcomm-made wireless baseband chip. On the AT&T version, an extra GPS chip had to be added along with the Broadcom-made Bluteooth and Wi-Fi chips, adding an extra cost of $1.50 per unit.

The baseband wireless chips were naturally different because AT&T and Verizon use different wireless technologies. Intel, the new owner of the former wireless chip division of Infineon, supplied the main wireless chip in the AT&T version, with supporting chips coming from TriQuint Semiconductor and Skyworks for a combined cost of $18.70.

Qualcomm supplied the main wireless chip Verizon version, with supporting chips coming from Skyworks, Avago Technologies, and Murata for a combined cost of $16.35. While there had been some speculation that Apple had used a Qualcomm chip in both versions, but it turned out not to be the case.

Aside from the wireless chips, the components are otherwise identical across both versions. Both sport Apple’s A5 chip, and iSuppli says that Samsung is still manufacturing it for Apple at a cost of $14. While there had been some talk in recent weeks that Apple was moving its chip manufacturing contract to Tawain Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, there’s no evidence that it has made such a move, at least not yet.

The most expensive component by far is the touch-sensitive display, coming at $127. ISuppli says that the LCD portion the unit they tore apart was built by LG Display, but Apple is known to use other sources for displays, including Samsung, and possibly ChiMei Innolux. The glass assembly covering the display is thought to come from TPK or WinTek. ISuppli says costs on the display are going up because manufacturing yields on LCDs have been lower. Apple is also thought to be using a more expensive glue to improve the efficiency of the process of bonding a new thinner type of Gorilla glass to the display.

Samsung supplied Apple with the NAND flash memory used in the iSuppli sample, holding on to a relationship that goes back several years to the days of the first iPod nano, though Toshiba is also known to supply Apple with flash. It is the world biggest consumer of flash memory, after all. Elpida supplied the DRAM memory. ISuppli estimates the combined cost of memory, both flash and DRAM plus a Micron-made MCP memory chip at $65.70.

Then there’s a set of components seen in the iPad 1 that remained the same in the iPad 2. STMicroelectronics supplied the gyroscope and the accelerometer, and AKM Semiconductor supplied the electronic compass. Broadcom supplied touch interface chips, while Texas Instruments supplied a touch screen driver chip. Analog Devices supplied a capacitive touch controller.

Finally there are the two cameras. ISuppli hasn’t yet named the suppliers there, though the usual candidate is Aptina, the former camera unit of Micron, though it’s possible that Apple sources them from more than one place.

ISuppli’s estimates are a lot higher than the findings of another teardown shop, UBM Techinsights. The Wall Street Journal reported that UBM’s cost estimate is about $270, but that estimate was made before it conducted its actual teardown, and didn’t change once it had.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110313/days-after-its-release-the-ipad-2-gets-the-teardown-treatment/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20110217/broadcom-ceo-on-low-cost-android-phones-free-tablets-and-and-the-promise-of-russian-satellites/ http://allthingsd.com/20110217/broadcom-ceo-on-low-cost-android-phones-free-tablets-and-and-the-promise-of-russian-satellites/#comments Thu, 17 Feb 2011 14:00:55 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=4331 If the headline doesn’t make it clear, I covered a lot of ground in a chat I had here in Barcelona with Scott McGregor, CEO of chipmaker Broadcom.

For those who don’t know Broadcom, it is an Orange County, Calif.-based company that makes chips that go into all kinds of communications gear, from cable modems to cellphones to set-top boxes. It has steadily expanded its range through a steady stream of acquisitions.

Just at this week’s Mobile World Congress alone, the company announced plans for a whole range of new chips, including a processor that the company said should help Google in its goal of driving Android down into lower price points.

“The chips we’ve announced allow for Android phones to cover the gamut,” McGregor told Mobilized. While rivals such as Nvidia and Qualcomm plan ever more powerful chips for the high end of the phone and tablet markets, Broadcom is looking to crack into the Android processor market by driving down cost.

The key, he said, is that its processors, while perhaps not yet competitive at the ultra-high end of the smartphone market, integrate more functions than do rival chips. More stuff on a single chip means lower prices, and with Broadcom’s latest chip, Android devices should be able to stretch all the way down to the middle of the feature phone market.

Touring the company’s booth, McGregor pointed to a number of other interesting projects the company has going on in the wireless realm. For instance, the company is working on chips that expand the potential for location-based services by tapping more types of satellites. While GPS uses only American whirlybirds, data is also available now from Russian, Japanese and European satellites. The company is also working on technologies to improve location data inside buildings where satellites typically are of no help.

Another interesting area is in tablets. While much of the attention is on the iPad or its would-be rivals, McGregor said there is an emerging market for lower-end home units that can be given away by service providers like Comcast as another screen for users to consume content. While free tablets haven’t hit the U.S., McGregor said British Telecom and Japan’s NTT DoCoMo are among those offering such products.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110217/broadcom-ceo-on-low-cost-android-phones-free-tablets-and-and-the-promise-of-russian-satellites/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110107/youve-heard-about-windows-for-arm-chips-now-meet-arm/ http://allthingsd.com/20110107/youve-heard-about-windows-for-arm-chips-now-meet-arm/#comments Fri, 07 Jan 2011 16:00:11 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=1467 For all the attention being paid to the fact that Windows now runs on ARM chips from the likes of Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and Nvidia, few people know much about ARM, the British company whose technology is central to so many of the devices seen at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.

Shares in ARM have nearly tripled in value from this time a year ago, and the most recent surge occurred in December, when the first reports emerged that Microsoft would do something that previously seemed almost unthinkable: Create a version of Windows designed to run on chips other than the x86 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Microsoft confirmed the news two days ago. If 2011 is going to be the year of the tablet, then chances are it’s going to be the year of ARM chips.

The funny thing is, practically every year has been a good year for ARM chips. They’re so widely used already that there’s a good chance you use them, probably several of them, every day. During its most recent quarter, more than 900 million ARM-based chips were sold in mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, while another 600 million were used in devices as varied as TV, toys, cars, alarm clocks and remote controls.

ARM doesn’t build the chips itself; it designs the cores–or central brains–used on those chips. I like to compare it to selling a basic cake recipe. If you’re a baker whose expertise is making really great frosting, why bother dreaming up a brand-new cake recipe when you can use an existing one, and instead use your time and effort to make great frosting? A lot of semiconductor and electronics companies have reached the same conclusion, and paid to license ARM’s recipes for chips, and then built their own custom enhancements around the ARM core.

It’s a pretty popular recipe. The company issued more than 700 licenses as of last year to some 250 chip companies, which then turned around and sold the chips to more than 1,000 manufacturers. ARM estimates that in 2009 four billion chips based on its designs were sold, and that more than 20 billion have been sold in the two decades since the company launched.

Aside from the three ARM-based chips from Texas Instruments, Nvidia and Qualcomm that Microsoft demonstrated running Windows as part of CEO Steve Ballmer’s Jan. 5 keynote presentation at CES, the list of companies using ARM includes Samsung, Broadcom, Toshiba and scores of smaller chip companies.

ARM also has an interesting history. It was founded as a joint venture between Apple and a British outfit called Acorn Computers in 1990. Apple’s interest was to create and develop a chip that would run the Newton, and spur the development of a new-age handheld computer that the Newton was supposed to bring about. (As a few commenters note below, the first ARM chips were used in desktop computers sold primarily in the U.K.) The Newton went nowhere, but the vision for ARM as the chip of choice for mobile computing was right on the money. ARM chips from Motorola (now Freescale) landed in devices from Palm and early handhelds running Windows Mobile. ARM flourished and went public on the London Stock Exchange in 1998. Between 1998 and 2004, Apple sold off its ARM shares for combined proceeds of almost $800 million.

Now having built a considerable lead in the wireless world, ARM-based chips look awfully strong as the battle over tablets shapes up. And beyond that lies higher-end computing opportunities like servers. Some think Intel should be worried. Despite this week’s launch of its Sandy Bridge generation of PC processors, Intel’s shares are trading lower today than they did at the start of the week.

I caught up briefly with ARM Executive Vice President Antonio Viana by phone from CES to talk about the year ahead for ARM.

There’s been a lot of attention around ARM coming into the Windows fold, and everyone knows it from its strength in the wireless devices. How is 2011 shaping up for ARM?

We got our start more than 20 years introducing a chip architecture aimed primarily at the mobile industry. We offered a chip design that’s efficient in the way it consumes power. What happened was the technology moved beyond the cellphone: Into the home, cars, printers. And that trend is continuing. Consumers want features that require a lot more computing power. Some of these devices are handhelds, some aren’t. What makes the ARM architecture central to all that is that industry brings their own secret sauce, their own pieces to the table. The development with Microsoft is just a small microcosm of that.

Are there new licensees coming on?

Our roadmap is constantly evolving, and we’ve developed the architecture for a pretty broad set of use cases. We license to companies like NXP that are relatively simple 8- and 16-bit microcontroller chips that go into industrial equipment, or meters or toys. But because of the network connectivity requirements that are starting to come to those devices, you’re starting to see some of these move to more versatile 32-bit chips and the costs are manageable because developers are so used to working with ARM. Then if you swing way out to the other extreme we just launched our A15 architecture. That’s a multicore design, and it’s finding its way into next-generation servers.

Who’s using that?

Unfortunately, we can’t say yet. A15 was announced last year. We think we’ll start seeing production silicon in the latter half of next year, and there will be samples before that. When you start seeing samples then the partners working with it will start announcing products.

Obviously Intel has its Atom processor, which it has aimed at tablets and handhelds and many other market segments you’re involved in. What kind of competitive threat do you see from Intel?

The competitive threat is certainly there–x86 is incredibly robust and it has the incredible capital resources of Intel behind it. ‘Nuff said. Intel will be successful in various markets they go after. We’d be fools not to acknowledge that. But the question is who’s going to grow more? Who is going to leverage off the market trends right now? Tablets are a wonderful example of that. Right now about 90 percent of all tablets in the marketplace are ARM-powered. At a show like CES you see a lot of things that indicate the market trends. You always have to take a step back and wonder which of the things you see may never happen. But the trends are usually accurate. One of those trends is for always-on, always-connected power-efficient devices. When you look at it that way I’m pretty comfortable with ARM’s position.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110107/youve-heard-about-windows-for-arm-chips-now-meet-arm/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20101230/who-isnt-rambus-suing-at-the-itc/ http://allthingsd.com/20101230/who-isnt-rambus-suing-at-the-itc/#comments Thu, 30 Dec 2010 17:27:46 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=1209 Shares in the perpetual patent litigation machine known as Rambus received a healthy boost yesterday on word that the International Trade Commission had taken up its patent complaint against a litany of technology companies.

Rambus, whose nominal specialty is designing ways for chips to pass data back and forth but which is better known for more than a decade of bitter legal battles, earlier this month filed a complaint with the ITC, saying that products from several companies contained chips that infringe on its patents.

As anyone who’s been paying attention to the numerous patent battles around smartphones knows, the ITC is generally seen as a fast track to a settlement of a patent dispute. Since federal courts are slow and litigation is expensive, companies often go to the ITC ostensibly to block the import of products found to infringe on patents. Since practically every technology product is built outside the U.S., sales of an infringing product can be subject to an exclusion order, the usual outcome when a violation is found.

What’s interesting is the wide range of companies that Rambus has named in its complaint: Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Nvidia, Broadcom, Seagate, Motorola, Garmin, Asus and Hitachi are among the better known ones. The full list contains 34 companies, including some subsidiaries.

Some of the patents involved in this complaint were the subject of a prior case that Rambus took to the ITC against Nvidia. The commission ruled the patents–known as the Barth family of patents–were valid and issued an exclusion order, prompting Nvidia to come to the table and sign a licensing agreement in August. Rambus is obviously looking for a similar outcome from Broadcom and Freescale, which it says are among those now infringing on the Barth patents.

Additionally there’s another set of patents known as the Dally family, which Rambus didn’t invent but to which it holds a license. The patents are owned by MIT and are based on the work of Bill Dally, a former MIT professor of electrical engineering who’s now at Stanford University. The patents had been licensed exclusively to a small private firm called Velio Communications, where Dally had been CTO and which was acquired by the chip maker LSI Logic in March of 2004.

In a twist that could happen only in the strange world that is patent law, Rambus acquired the exclusive license to Velio’s serial interface patents–the Dally family–in a separate deal in the waning months of 2003. The irony is that LSI is among those being sued for infringing on the Dally patents. Some M&A lawyers at LSI must be kicking themselves today.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101230/who-isnt-rambus-suing-at-the-itc/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101216/apple-ipad-secrets-from-the-insider-trading-case/ http://allthingsd.com/20101216/apple-ipad-secrets-from-the-insider-trading-case/#comments Thu, 16 Dec 2010 20:55:34 +0000 Shira Ovide http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=34059 Apple Inc. is a major actor in one of the most intriguing sections of the government’s 39-page complaint against four men arrested and charged in a massive sting of insider trading.

Secrets about tech companies are a major feature of the insider trading charges unveiled so far. Companies including AMD, Dell, Research in Motion, Marvell, Western Digital, Taiwan Semiconductor, Sierra Wireless and Broadcom allegedly had secrets leaked about them — including revenue and sales forecasts.

The alleged secrets passed about Apple products and product sales came courtesy of a business development official at Flextronics, Walter Shimoon, according to the government’s legal complaint released today. The government said Flextronics had business dealings with Apple, including supplying parts such as the camera and charger components for the iPhone and iPod.

Shimoon, according to the insider-trading charges, gave an unnamed government witness a secretive chat about a brand new Apple device in the works. The conversation took place in Oct 2009, nearly four months before the introduction of the iPad.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101216/apple-ipad-secrets-from-the-insider-trading-case/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101013/broadcom-buys-beceem-for-4g-build-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20101013/broadcom-buys-beceem-for-4g-build-up/#comments Wed, 13 Oct 2010 20:52:46 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=31027 Broadcom, a leading maker of chips for mobile devices, is girding for the next generation of wireless technologies by buying Beceem Communications, a closely held maker of chips for 4G LTE and WiMax devices, for $316 million in cash.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101013/broadcom-buys-beceem-for-4g-build-up/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100607/susquehanna-downgrades-intel-broadcom-on-slower-demand/ http://allthingsd.com/20100607/susquehanna-downgrades-intel-broadcom-on-slower-demand/#comments Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:38:31 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=25764 Susquehanna Financial Group analyst Chris Caso this afternoon downgraded both Intel (INTC) and Broadcom (BRCM), citing signs of slowing end market demand for PCs.

• Intel: Caso cuts his rating to Neutral from Positive based on checks that find a weakening PC environment leading into Q3. “The secular elements of our INTC thesis remain intact, but we believe estimates need to come down, and are hesitant to continue recommending the stock ahead of estimate cuts,” he writes. Caso thinks we could be beaded for the worst Q3 for notebooks since 2001.
• Broadcom: Caso moves his rating to Neutral from Positive. He writes in a research note that checks find “a broader slowdown in end-market demand.” Caso says his primary areas of concerns are not a large percentage of the company’s revenue, we nonetheless thinks a slowdown will make it tough for the stock to outperform until demand issues are resolved. In particular, he has concerns about demand in the PC, consumer electronics and Nokia (NOK) handset markets.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100607/susquehanna-downgrades-intel-broadcom-on-slower-demand/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100309/apple-to-build-5-million-ipads-in-first-half-2010-analyst-says/ http://allthingsd.com/20100309/apple-to-build-5-million-ipads-in-first-half-2010-analyst-says/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:25:30 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=22374 Apple (AAPL) is on track to build five million iPads in the first half of 2010, according to FBR Capital chip analyst Craig Berger.

“We believe various news articles and competitor notes calling for a build delay were just false alarms,” he writes. The company, of course, has now set an April 3 launch for Wi-Fi versions of the iPad, with 3G versions to ship toward the end of April. Berger, who tracks the chip industry, thinks many iPhone component suppliers will also sell into the iPad, including Infineon (IFX), Skyworks (SKWS), Triquint (TQNT), Broadcom (BRCM) and Texas Instruments (TXN). Production in the 4-5 million unit range would “drive some material revenues” for these companies, he says, “particularly BRCM.”

Meanwhiile, Berger has revised his estimates on iPod, iPhone, notebook and desktop builds.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100309/apple-to-build-5-million-ipads-in-first-half-2010-analyst-says/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091022/broadcom-slumps-q3-results-top-estimates-sees-sequentially-flat-q4-revs-revised/ http://allthingsd.com/20091022/broadcom-slumps-q3-results-top-estimates-sees-sequentially-flat-q4-revs-revised/#comments Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:50:46 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=16945 Broadcom (BRCM) shares are down sharply in late trading after the chip maker posted Q3 earnings.

Note: Broadcom has the confusing habit of reporting only GAAP profits, while the Street tracks non-GAAP results. This made it look like the company suffered a huge earnings miss in the quarter, although this turns out not to be the case. Read on.

For the quarter, the company reported revenue of $1.254 billion, up 20.6 percent from the second quarter, down 3.4 percent from a year ago, and ahead of the Street at $1.16 billion.

GAAP EPS was 16 cents a share, which a Broadcom spokesman notes is above the Street at 11 cents. On a non-GAAP basis–a number not in the release–the company earned 40 cents, beating the Street consensus at 33 cents.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091022/broadcom-slumps-q3-results-top-estimates-sees-sequentially-flat-q4-revs-revised/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090727/broadcom-jmp-cuts-on-pricing-worries-sluggish-margins/ http://allthingsd.com/20090727/broadcom-jmp-cuts-on-pricing-worries-sluggish-margins/#comments Mon, 27 Jul 2009 07:00:18 +0000 Tiernan Ray http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=13802 Shares of chip maker Broadcom (BRCM) fell in after-hours trading last night and are down again today despite the fact that the company yesterday exceeded Street expectations for its Q2 and forecast above estimates for the current quarter.

A note from JMP Research’s Alax Gauna sums up the bear case for the stock. Gauna writes today that Broadcom’s beat was aided by a $65.3 million payment from Qualcomm (QCOM) as a result of a settlement reached between the two back in April.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090727/broadcom-jmp-cuts-on-pricing-worries-sluggish-margins/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090618/broadcom-charter-equity-turns-bullish-cites-nokia-deal/ http://allthingsd.com/20090618/broadcom-charter-equity-turns-bullish-cites-nokia-deal/#comments Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:45:36 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=12792 Charter Equity Research analyst Edward Snyder today lifted his rating on Broadcom (BRCM) to Buy from Market Perform. In his research note, Snyder said he expects to see an increase this fall in the company’s revenue from the wireless segment as volumes rise in shipments of EDGE system-on-a-chip components to Nokia (NOK) for its low-end phones.

Snyder says the part had been delayed by a “noise issue” that now appears to be corrected. Snyder says the total EDGE market could be in the $200 million to $250 million range; he says the low-cost portion targeted by Broadcom will be just a small fraction of the market, but that successful deployment of the EDGE SOC “would ensure Broadcom’s position in the top echelon of baseband providers.”

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090618/broadcom-charter-equity-turns-bullish-cites-nokia-deal/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090504/emulex-to-broadcom-you-call-that-thing-an-offer/ http://allthingsd.com/20090504/emulex-to-broadcom-you-call-that-thing-an-offer/#comments Mon, 04 May 2009 18:07:40 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=16855 Emulex dissed and dismissed an unsolicited bid from Broadcom this morning saying it “significantly undervalues Emulex” and is not in the best interests of shareholders. In a blistering letter appended to the rejection announcement, Emulex (ELX) CEO Paul Folino described Broadcom’s (BRCM) unsolicited $9.25-a-share cash takeover offer as “an opportunistic attempt to take advantage of Emulex’s depressed stock price” in a souring economy. “Your proposal is approximately 37% below the Company’s 52-week high of $14.74 per share,” Folino writes. “Over this same time period, the Nasdaq is down approximately 33% and our industry as a whole is trading at significantly depressed values. Additionally, Emulex’s stock was trading near its lowest levels in nearly ten years just before your proposal.”

Continuing, Folino accuses Broadcom of engineering its bid to commandeer new contracts that Emulex recently won at the expense of its rivals–including Broadcom.

“Your unsolicited proposal is opportunistic given Broadcom is uniquely aware of the new unannounced design wins that Emulex has secured with tier-one OEMs at the expense of Broadcom and other competitors,” Folino writes. “As you know, these design wins are kept confidential at our customers’ request and do not typically begin contributing revenue for several quarters. Thus, Emulex’s stock price does not fully reflect the long-term value creation potential that the Company has already secured. However, given that some of these design wins have come at your expense, including your core Ethernet networking business, you are uniquely aware of the future value we have secured and how well positioned we are to unseat you on many other platforms in the near future. We believe your proposal is an opportunistic attempt to capture that value, which rightly belongs to our stockholders.”

In other words, quit low-balling us–especially if, as you profess, you’d like to move ahead with a deal in a “friendly, collaborative manner.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090504/emulex-to-broadcom-you-call-that-thing-an-offer/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20090427/qualcomm-to-pay-broadcom-891m-in-patent-settlement/ http://allthingsd.com/20090427/qualcomm-to-pay-broadcom-891m-in-patent-settlement/#comments Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:41:50 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=11255 Qualcomm (QCOM) announced that it will pay Broadcom (BRCM) $891 million over a four-year period to settle their long-standing patent dispute. The deal settles all existing litigation between the companies. Each receives certain rights to the patent portfolios of the other company. Terms of the licensing revenue model for Qualcomm’s 3G and 4G patents are unchanged.

The two companies agreed not to assert patents against each other; Broadcom also agreed not to sue Qualcomm’s customers over products that include Qualcomm chips in cellular prodocuts.

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