CES 2020 Overview
We published our latest newsletter today with our thoughts on CES 2020. The excerpt below is the front page of that note. Please drop us a line if you would like to subscribe. A Year of Gradual,...
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Down a 5G Rabbit Hole
Strange things are happening everywhere. Covid, volcanoes, locusts, murder wasps. Even the staid world of wireless standards is undergoing its own frictions. And while the impact of that is admittedly...
View ArticleAnarchy in the OS – Revisited
The definition of a ‘computer’ continues to shapeshift. In the future, the term will become almost meaningless as highly powerful information machines get ever-deeper embedded in the fabric of our...
View ArticleAre you dense?
The world is going to need a lot more cell sites for 5G, and it is not clear where the sites are going to come from. Put simply, the networks need to get denser and the path to that densification is...
View ArticleThe Five Year Plan for Semiconductors
The US government continues to toy with ways to “encourage” the US semiconductor industry. We think this is a bad idea at any time, and a particularly bad idea right now. This was brought to our...
View Article5G and the Bandit
Remember the 1977 ‘classic’ film “Smokey and the Bandit“. Burt Reynolds plays a free-wheeling race car driver speeding along the highways of America outsmarting the police with his ragtag army of...
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China RF Semis
A few weeks back we wrote about RF Semiconductors. We closed with a section on China RF companies: As with all things in technology today, we also have to consider what is happening with RF in China....
View ArticleWho benefits from Huawei’s predicament?
Last week we examined the very limited number of options Huawei has now. We then started to write about who are the winners and losers from a diminished Huawei. And this turned out to be a very...
View ArticleNvida to Acquire Arm – first impressions
Update: We misread the 2016 press release announcing the Softbank acquisition. We have updated this post with the correct numbers. Turns out Softbank isn’t making such a goo return on this deal. So...
View ArticleConsumers – The Final Frontier of Space
Going to space has gotten a lot cheaper over the past few years. Once solely the domain of the nation sates, it is now possible for almost “anyone” to launch am orbital vehicle. Here is a good graphic...
View ArticleThe Buck in Buck Rodgers
This is a follow-up to our post earlier in the week about the new wave of Satellite and Spacetech companies. Here we will examine the funding dynamics these companies face. Suppose a start-up has some...
View Article5G is Here!* Right?
For wireless people, the big excitement in last week’s iPhone launch was the inclusion of mmWave capabilities in all the new phones. We are skeptical about the timeline for mmWave. We lost a lunch bet...
View ArticleHow Huawei Will Survive
Two interesting articles came out over the weekend looking at Huawei and the US Government’s attempts to hobble it. First, some context. The US Government has issued a set of rules that seem to make...
View ArticleApple Si – The Surprise Twist – It’s not About Money
We have been examining the decline in Apple’s gross margins over the past four years, and working out the possible causes of that decline. We are not really Apple analysts, but we wanted to understand...
View ArticleApple is Building its Own Modem (Redux)
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has done some more reporting on Apple’s chip business (he has been busy lately). His sources confirmed that Apple is in fact building their own cellular modem. Apparently, the...
View ArticleMore Fun with Wireless Standards
Confirming what everyone had expected for a long time, the body that sets wireless standards – the 3GPP – announced this week that it is dealing “Release 17” of the 5G standard into 2022. We wrote...
View ArticleYou’re Going to Need a Bigger Footprint
On their earnings call this week, Verizon noted they are planning to deploy 14,000 mmWave small cells in 2021. The FCC estimates that to provide nationwide mmWave coverage it will take 2 million small...
View ArticleWho is Going to Build Small Cells?
Yesterday we touched on the subject of 5G small cells. We noted that none of the carriers, with the kinda, sorta exception of Verizon, are in a big hurry to deploy those small cells. We have detailed...
View ArticleRF Semis Update
We usually do an annual review of the market for RF semis around Mobile World Congress. That is not happening now, and probably not this year at all. Since we touched on the subject earlier in the...
View ArticleGamma Ray Exposure Preferred; Not Required
Apple is hiring 6G engineers. Are they so forward thinking that they are a whole generation ahead? The answer is no they will get to 6G when everyone else gets there (late 2020’s), but there job...
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