We all have echoed the fact that the arrival of fabless business model in the semiconductor industry has transformed it completely. The book, “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” provides several stories around that. In the backdrop of that, one key point to ponder upon is the start of pure-play foundries;… Read More
Tag: umc
Meeting Demand as Fab Capacity is Stretched Again
Global semiconductor production capacity and its utilization level are key elements of the technology economy. During a panel at DAC in June Mentor Graphics posited that we are entering into a period where leading edge processes will be in high demand and also older nodes are seeing increasing demand due to Internet of Things designs… Read More
A Closer Look at Fab Closures Around the World
Electronics is unusually an evergreen industry where companies make profit, yet end-product prices go down significantly after a brief period of price skimming. A product phases out quite fast (in case of smartphones every 1.5 to 2 years), but still yields big bucks for successful companies in its value-chain. How does this happen?… Read More
Changing Trends at the Top of Semicon Space
As we have moved down from a CAGR of ~9% over last three decades to a CAGR of ~5% in the current decade, it’s time to check the realities. It can be definitely argued that a 5% of CAGR over a solid base of ~$378 billion should be considered good enough. In my view that’s the sign of maturity in the semiconductor market. At the same time we are… Read More
Breakfast was Fab: West Coast Wafers to Wall Street
SEMI describes themselves as “the global industry association serving the manufacturing supply chain for the micro- and nano-electronics industries.” That is a pretty broad remit. One of the things that they do as a neutral party is produce the World Fab Forecast. This is actually a bottom-up database that tracks fabs as they … Read More
Intel to Buy Altera?
You may already have heard today’s big news in the semiconductor fabless ecosystem that Intel is apparently in talks to buy Altera. I embarrassed myself predicting that Samsung were in talks to buy Freescale (which, of course, they might have been but NXP won that particular race). But this time it is definite enough that … Read More
TSMC ♥ UMC?
The relationship between TSMC and UMC is one of the more interesting ones in the fabless semiconductor ecosystem in my opinion. Both are headquartered in Hsinchu Taiwan and it is very hard to visit one company without seeing the other as they have facilities right across the street from each other. They also share humble beginnings… Read More
FinFET Design Enablement
We read about FinFET technology in the semiconductor press daily now, thanks to Intel introducing their TriGate transistors starting in 2011 and creating a race with foundries and IDMs to switch from planar CMOS nodes. To get some perspective about the progress of FinFET IP and EDA tools I spoke with two experts from Synopsys, Swami… Read More
7nm node is arriving, which ones will continue past 2020?
‘Laughing Buddha’ is eternal, but for semiconductor industry, I must say it’s ‘laughing Moore’. Moore made a predictive hypothesis and the whole world is inclined to let that continue, eternally? When we were at 28nm, we weren’t hoping to go beyond 20/22nm; voices like ‘Moore’s law is dead’ started emerging. Today, we are already… Read More
Is Fab Business The Forte of APAC?
A little ago, I was looking at the top20 semiconductor companies in the world and was surprised to see a couple of large companies in Taiwan and South Korea garnering >34% of total sales (See – Look who is Leading the World Semiconductor Business). This time it’s another surprise, when I look at IC Insights report on global 300mm… Read More