ABI Research suggests HSDPA as a Low-Cost Path to Fast Mobile Broadband -- "Mobile communications infrastructure vendors and carriers, impatiently waiting to offer their customers mobile broadband services, would do well to consider HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) as an economical alternative. The prerequisites, according to ABI Research, are the rollouts of the next-generation UMTS networks that are starting to take place in Europe and Asia, and are planned for other regions. The area covered by these networks should expand and fill out very quickly starting in about 12 months, according to ABI Research. The arrival of this technology should boost data traffic and revenues, as well as demand for data cards. What about WiMAX's promise of ubiquitous broadband? IEEE 802.16e will most likely be offered mainly in dense metropolitan areas, and while it will be faster than HSDPA, and cheaper per bit, the upfront deployment costs are much, much higher."
Few technology sectors sit as close to the center of gravity in today's artificial intelligence (AI) economy as semiconductor manufacturing. Every AI chip that trains a frontier model, every GPU that powers a data center inference workload, and every power management IC that keeps hyperscaler facilities running traces its origins back to the global Foundry ecosystem. IDC's latest market study throws that reality into sharp relief, projecting that the broadly defined Foundry 2.0 market will surpass $360 billion in 2026, a 17 percent year-over-year gain that would have seemed optimistic even two years ago. For anyone advising boards or investment committees on technology and AI infrastructure strategy, this growth trajectory demands careful consideration. Foundry 2.0 Market Development The umbrella term covers four distinct verticals: pure-play foundry, non-memory integrated device manufacturer (IDM) production, outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT), and photomask fab...