Reports out of Taiwan (I’m in Hsinchu this week) have TSMC more than doubling 28nm wafer output in Q3 2012 due to yield improvements and capacity increases while only spending $3.6B of the $8.5B forecasted CAPEX! Current estimates have TSMC 28nm capacity at 100,000 300mm wafers (+/- 10%) per month versus 25,000 wafers reported… Read More
Qualcomm Acquires Intel’s Playbook
The Mobile Tsunami wave has yet to crest and the surfers strong enough to mount it are dwindling fast to the dismay of market watchers and experienced analysts. The distraction of these past few days is the courtroom drama being played out between the sumo wrestlers, Apple and Samsung, which in the end will not result in a cessation… Read More
The GLOBALFOUNDRIES Value Proposition!
From the very start I continually asked the GF guys what their value proposition is other than, “We are not TSMC”, which seems to be the easy way to foundry riches but clearly is not. In the early days of GF there was a lot of pride, pomp, and circumstance but that does not necessarily sell wafers. Today we are seeing a very different GF … Read More
TSMC Leads Semiconductor Sales Growth in 2012!
As a fitting postscript to my “Brief History of the Fabless Semiconductor Industry”, semiconductor research company IC Insights compiled a list of the top semiconductor companies for the first half of 2012. As the traditional IDMs go fabless and sink in the ratings, the foundries post record gains led by TSMC at 22%, GlobalFoundries… Read More
A Brief History of TSMC
In 1985 Morris Chang was recruited by the Taiwanese government to help develop the emerging semiconductor industry. In 1986 Morris joined the Hsinchu based non profit research institute ITRI as Chairman and President and launched what would be TSMC’s first semiconductor wafer fabrication plant on the ITRI campus. Taiwan… Read More
A Brief History of the Fabless Industry
Even though most of us have witnessed the emergence of the fabless semiconductor industry it is still good to go back and remember how we got to where we are today, to realize that the semiconductors that you now hold in your hand were enabled by the rise of the fabless semiconductor business model. This is the first in a series of blogs… Read More
The Coming Battle for AMD’s x86 Hidden Cache
Not yet a year into Rory Read’s term and the AMD board must be considering that the value of the x86 patents and engineering talent is worth much more than the stocks $3B valuation and easier to fathom putting on the auction block than continuing to sell $25 processors into the back channels of China and the Developing World. As I read… Read More
ARM and TSMC Beat Revenue Expectations Signaling Strength in a Weakening Economy?
Fabless semiconductor ecosystem bellwethers, TSMC and ARM, buck the trend reporting solid second quarters. Following “TSMC Reports Second Highest Quarterly Profit“, the British ARM Holdings “Outperforms Industry to Beat Forecasts“. Clearly the tabloid press death of the fabless ecosystem claims… Read More
Re-defining Semiconductor Collaboration!
GlobalFoundries did a nice response to my “How has 20nm Changed the Semiconductor Ecosystem?” and redefined the word collaboration. Our industry is plagued with sound bites and acronyms so let us agree on a semiconductor ecosystem definition of collaboration.
Mojy Chianis senior vice president, design enablement at… Read More
Morris Chang Comments on Q2 2012: 28nm, 20nm, 16nm, FinFets, CAPEX, etc…
Twenty eight nanometer is progressing very well. Our output and our yields are both above the plans that we set for ourselves and the plans that we communicated to our customers early in the year. Early in the year means January-February of the year, we set our plans in output and in yields and we, of course, ever since then we tried to… Read More
Will 50% of New High Performance Computing (HPC) Chip Designs be Multi-Die in 2025?