TSMC as Pure Play Wafer Foundry
TSMC started its wafer foundry business more than 30 years ago. Visionary management and creative engineering teams developed leading-edge process technologies and their reputation as trusted source for high-volume production. TSMC also recognized very early the importance of building an … Read More
Recently Seeking Alpha published an article “Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Losing Its Process Leadership To Intel” and Dan Nenni (SemiWiki founder) asked me to take a look at the article and do my own analysis. This is a subject I have followed and published on for many years.
Before I dig into specific process density… Read More
Covid issues create “lumpy” quarters due to delays
Orders & demand remain solid and strong
2020 Year financials intact so far but ignore Qtrs
Taking prudent actions- no buybacks or guidance
As expected, Covid impacts both shipments & supply chain, ignore the near term lumpiness…
ASML reported revenues… Read More
-Short term Covid19 impact is primarily logistics related
-Longer term impact is more systemic/demand driven
-Impact will wind through supply chain over several qtrs
-Other issues, such as trade, remain an overhang
Short term versus long term in the semiconductor industry
The stocks declines over the last months seem to indicate… Read More
Blocking chip sales to Huawei back on front burner
Covid19 & China Trade are equally bad
Long lived Uncertainty could “plague” industry sales going forward
Political Predictability worse than Disease Predictability
Reuters broke a story today that the proposed licensing of chip equipment to prevent “bad… Read More
The current leading edge of advanced lithography nodes (e.g., “7nm” or “1Z nm”) features pitches (center-center distances between lines) in the range of 30-40 nm. Whether EUV (13.5 nm wavelength) or ArF (193 nm wavelength) lithography is used, one thing for certain is that the minimum imaged pitch … Read More
Technological leadership has long been key to TSMC’s success and they are following up their leadership development of 5nm with the world’s smallest SRAM cell at 0.021um 2 with circuit design details of their write assist techniques necessary to achieve the full potential of this revolutionary technology. In addition to their… Read More
Corona Fab Impact –
lower production/raise prices
Chip production supply chain may break
It could temporarily fix memory oversupply
Could it risk the fall roll out of next Iphone
The ” Two week tango” – Waiting games at fabs
When a highly specialized piece of semiconductor equipment misbehaves to the… Read More
Each year on the Sunday before the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference, Nikon holds their LithoVision event. This year I had the privilege of being invited to speak for the third consecutive year, unfortunately, the event had to be canceled due to concerns over the COVID-19 virus but by the time the event was canceled I had already… Read More
The new coronavirus outbreak or COVID-19 outbreak, as it is now officially called, continues to dominate the news again this week as currently there is no end forecast to the outbreak, and infection numbers continue to rise. This will have an impact on semiconductor supplies in the coming months and into Q2 as the necessary restrictions… Read More
