14 DAY TRIAL // Wafers are thin slices of highly processed silicon that are used to make integrated circuits. When global wafer shipments grew, so did the whole semiconductor industry.
SEMI has reportedly concluded that the total wafer area shipments has grown 1 percent compared to last quarter.
That can be called good news only in part.
If an IC designer worked hard, developed higher performance chips and succeeded to maintain his share of the market, he might actually order the same amount of wafers.
Considering the state of the global economy right now, this is probably good news also.
An IC designer might have to design a more complex chip to be able to hold onto its share of the market, and a more complex chip generally means a larger chip that has a larger die area, considering the same generation of manufacturing technology is being used.
The larger chip we’re talking about will take more space on the wafer and more wafers would be required to be able to produce the same number of chips.
Therefore, when faced with wafer shipments fluctuating in the 1 to 3 percent area, we shouldn’t hurry to praise the “recovering” industry. Some IC designers will go for more complex chips using the same manufacturing technology.
Others will go for a smaller process. It is very difficult to estimate where the industry is heading by these numbers.
When we take into account the fact that, compared to the same period last year, wafer shipments are down 11 percent, we might endeavor to draw the conclusion that the industry is, at least momentarily, heading the wrong way.
Lack of true innovation from the x86 players might have something to do with this. Neither AMD nor Intel have presented any revolutionary design in the last year.
Sure, we have Ivy Bridge, but, on the performance side, there is nothing Conroe-like and AMD’s Llano, while having great success in the desktop market, only managed to kick Intel’s lower quality products from the mid and low end buyers’ computers and did not manage to grow the market altogether.