Let’s take them in reverse order…

5. ESMC breaks ground on Dresden fab
ESMC – a jv between TSMC, Bosch, Infineon and NXP – broke ground for its first fab in Dresden yesterday, with the EU announcing it had approved a €5 billion subsidy from the German government for the €10 billion project. ”Together with our partners, Bosch, Infineon and NXP, we are building our Dresden facility to meet the semiconductor needs of the rapidly growing European automotive and industrial sectors,” said TSMC Chairman & CEO C.C. Wei.

4. RAN market continues decline
Radio Access Network (RAN) market conditions remain challenging, says Dell’Oro, with global RAN revenues declining at a double-digit rate year-over-year for a fourth consecutive quarter. At the same time, pockets of the market are performing better, with three out of the six tracked regions growing, up from one region in 1Q 2024. “Even if the RAN market is still down at a double-digit RAN market continues declinerate in the first half, the second quarter offered some glimmer of hope that the nadir of this cycle…”

3. AMD buys server manufacturer
AMD is to buy ZT Systems, the server manufacturer, for $4.9 billion. The acquisition is intended to streamline AMD’s process of developing, testing and selling GPUs for training and running AI systems. ZT has annual revenues of about $10 billion. AMD says it will spin off its server manufacturing business when the ZT deal is completed. AMD’s current data centre hardware business is expected to have revenues of over $100 million this year.

2. Automotive semis to be worth $88bn+ by 2027
The automotive semiconductor market will be worth over $88 billion by 2027, says IDC, driven by the demand for HPC ICs, GPUs, radar chips, and laser sensors. Fuelling the growth is the increasing adoption of ADAS, EVs, and the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), according to 2023 Worldwide Competitive Landscape of Automotive Semiconductor. According to IDC, the top five vendors in the automotive semiconductor market had over 50% of the market share in 2023.

1. Lower cost Raspberry Pi 5
A 2Gbyte Raspberry Pi 5 has been launched, priced at $50 compared with $60 for the 4Gbyte version. As well as reduced memory size, cost-saving comes from changing the main processor IC. 4 and 8Gbyte models have the 16nm Broadcom BCM2712C1, which has quad 2.4GHz Arm Cortex-A76 cores. “Alongside the features required to power a Raspberry Pi, it also contains functionality intended to serve other markets, which we don’t need,” said Raspbearry Pi CEO Eben Upton.