TSMC reported an in line quarter, as expected and also reported down Q1 guidance, also as expected. The only thing some investors may have been caught off guard about is the magnitude of the expected drop, 14%, from $9.4B to $7.35B. This is the largest quarter over quarter drop for TSMC in a very long time. Importantly for TSMC, 7NM … Read More
Over the holidays I did an interview with CNBC on the subject of Qualcomm. The producer had read the History of Qualcomm chapter in our book Mobile Unleashed and wanted to base a 15 minute report on it. The interview lasted 90 minutes but of course only snippets of what I said were used. You can see the recorded report by clicking on the… Read More
We attended the Needham Growth Conference which is one of the first conferences of the year and in the quiet period before most companies reported so even though there was no “official” comment from most companies on the quarter, the surrounding commentary spoke volumes:
Strong Overall Market Growth but a Slowdown Looms
After six years of single digit percentage growth in the overall semiconductor market, 2017 saw almost 22% growth and 2018 year-to-date is up roughly 17% (based on numbers published by the world semiconductor trade statistics). The big growth driver the last two years has been … Read More
On the first day of trading in the new year Apple just announced, after the close, that revenues will be lower than previously expected coming in at $84B versus the expected range of $89B to $93B and analyst estimates of the current quarter at $91.5B. Ugly….. The blame was laid squarely on China as slowing sales and trade tensions… Read More
The semiconductor foundry business has gone through a dynamic transformation over the last 30 years. In the beginning the foundries were several process nodes behind the IDMs with little hope of catching up. Today the foundries are leading the process development race at 10nm – 7nm, and will continue to do so, absolutely.… Read More
At IEDM this December Imec presented “Interconnect metals beyond copper – reliability challenges and opportunities”. In addition to seeing the paper presented I had a chance to interview one of the authors, Kristof Croes. Replacements for copper are a hot subject and I will summarize the challenges and Imec’s work.… Read More
At IEDM last week Anthony (Tony) Yen, Vice President and Head, Technology Development Centers Worldwide for ASML presented a paper entitled “EUV Lithography at Threshold of High-Volume Manufacturing” authored by Anthony Yen, Hans Meiling, and Jos Benschop. At IEDM I had a chance to sit down with Tony and discuss the paper and … Read More
IEDM is a premier semiconductor conference so it was certainly appropriate for Samsung to do the keynote since they are the largest and one of the most innovative semiconductor companies in the world, absolutely.
Samsung is also one of the more interesting semiconductor companies since they do it all: chip design, semiconductor… Read More
Growing up in a military family, mostly in California, I would consider my cultural diversity life experience to be more than most. I remember in the 1960s some older folks were chattering about a colored family moving into our neighborhood and they had a son my age. Imagine my excitement as a child in having a multicolored friend!… Read More
