Every Industry Strategy Symposium includes not only the latest macro- and microeconomic forecasts and predictions, but a lot of interesting factoids that offer bite-size food for thought.
The 2008 edition is no exception, so here are some not necessarily easily digestible mouthfuls for the brain.
At the end of his invigorating presentation, IC Insights' Bill McClean noted the riskiness of the IC business, citing an example of the potential vulnerability of the chipmaking industry to the market-altering power of Mama Nature. "Imagine the impact of Hsinchu's fabs being knocked out for three months by an earthquake or typhoon?!" He then said that by 2009, Hsinchu will have the highest installed fab capacity of any place on the planet.
Reminds me of an old joke that made the rounds several years back after those major fab fires in Taiwan, where the punchline rang, "that's one way to deal with overcapacity." Now multiply that exponentially courtesy of an 8.0+ quake or Category 5 storm, and you have the stuff of an industry---and global electronics---nightmare.
VLSI Research's Dan Hutcheson, always one to rattle a few cages and provoke discussions with his outspoken views and analyses, offered up a tidbit during his talk. Noting how Wall Street has pressured chipmakers to adopt more of a fab-lite strategy for the sake of better financials, he said that Texas Instruments actually lost some of the Nokia business and hence market share when it abandoned its advanced process development, yet it saw a bump in its stock price. "Because of Wall Street," Dan claimed, "no one wants to own a fab."
That said, one of Dan's themes is that the foundry/fabless model may be reaching its limits (which doesn't bode well for those fab-liters), and that we might be seeing the return to dominance of certain, agile IDMs that can take advantage of weaker fabless suppliers.
Financial numbers aren't the only ones that amuse, boggle, and baffle. Steve Schwartz, erstwhile president and CEO of Asyst Technologies, enlightened the audience about the challenges faced by the automation equipment sector and some possible solutions. One slide in particular drove home how the challenges to automated material (AKA wafer) transportation in the fabs have been compounded by both factory size and process technology.
He showed how the number of front-opening unified pods (FOUPs, which he characterized as "one of the worst names ever") has increased exponentially since the days of 90-nm fabs running about 25,000 wafer-starts per month, which had about 35,000 FOUP moves per day among the toolsets, stockers, and the like. Push the wafer starts up to megafab levels of 100,000 and the process to 65 nm, and the FOUP moves jump to 175,000. Take it even further to the realm of gigafabs pushing 200,000 wafers monthly at 32 nm, and the model shows 450,000 FOUP moves per day. Throw in the wild card of greatly improved throughputs/productivity in the wafer-starved process tools, and the traffic congestion on the factory floor achieves levels comparable to rush-hour on a very bad freeway day, but all day long.
My final thought munchie has to do with conference etiquette---or lack of it. Last year I railed against those who seem to be surfing the Web or doing work on their laptops all or most of the day, seemingly paying little attention to the presentations they or their companies paid good money for them to see/hear.
This time my beef is with a couple of chatterboxes I observed near my seat, who carried on a conversation over the course of a presentation (or two), at times sorta sotto voce, other times well above whisper mode. They laughed, they smiled, they apparently thought themselves more clever and more knowledgeable than the speaker, given their lack of respect for him. Next to one of them was a titan of the industry, arms tightly folded, who sent a few dagger-glances in their direction, but was too polite to tell them to shut the f*$@ up! (I noticed said titan did move a few rows away from Messrs. Chatterbox after the break.)
Hey, many of us make the occasional comment to our neighbors during talks at symposia and conferences, but a nearly nonstop whisper-and-giggle fest is downright rude.
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