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Editor's Blog

The blog is written by Semiconductor Fabtech's Editor-in-Chief, Mark Osborne. He has been covering the semiconductor and related industries for over ten years. Mark has been blogging tech since 2005.

Toshiba considering fab restructuring

03 December 2008
Supported by growing losses and weakening demand, Toshiba Corp is considering a major reorganization of its semiconductor operations, though no timeline was given, according to a Bloomberg story, citing Masashi Muromachi, Corporate Senior Executive Vice President of Toshiba’s semiconductor business units. Read more >>

Update: Elpida joins cash preservation society and more!

06 November 2008
Global DRAM CapacityThe news that Elpida Memory is putting a 300mm joint venture fab in China on hold makes perfect sense for the DRAM producer as it posted its fourth straight quarter of financial losses. Even though the deal with SVG, a Chinese venture capital group based in Suzhou City, meant that the local government would pay for the construction and offer a wide range of other incentives along the lines of those SMIC has benefited from, the whole project didn’t make much sense in the first place? Read more >>

Is Samsung planning a 50 percent cut in capex?

24 October 2008
Samsungs Austin FabEven Samsung is feeling the effects of overcapacity and plunging ASPs for its NAND and DRAM chips as its quarterly profits declined 44 percent and only made approximately $850 million in the last quarter. Things like mobile phones and LCD’s are now under huge pricing pressure with margins down to just 7 percent.Semiconductor margins are down 74 percent Y-on-Y. Read more >>

Pulse taking

22 October 2008
Cymer Listening to the latest Cymer conference call highlighted that the major foundries are seeing a significant drop in fab utilization rates. Cymer provides a laser pulse chart each quarter, highlighting the use of its lasers during the lithography process step. Read more >>

Quarterly Quotes to make you laugh and cry

16 October 2008
Winston ChurchillA long time ago I thought it would be a good - perhaps funny-ish - blog idea to regularly post some good quotes from semiconductor executives. The problem was there weren’t any! Well, there were some occasionally, but not enough of them to string together to make any sense. Read more >>

Does ASML walk on water? Intel places first major immersion lithography tool order

15 October 2008 | Comments (7)
ASML XT1950HIHaving claimed 65 percent of the lithography market in 2007, ASML positioned itself for further gains in 2008. The significant capital spending cuts by memory manufacturers this year, coupled to very tight spending from the major foundries, meant that not even Moore’s Law enablers such as lithography tool vendors would be immune from the serious slump in spending. Read more >>

AMD’s gamble

08 October 2008 | Comments (4)
AMD will continue to struggle and its foundry friend doesn’t look set to do any better. We all waited and waited and waited some more to find out from AMD and Hector Ruiz what exactly was its ‘asset smart’ plan. Now that it has been revealed, it is very close to what we and others thought it would mean. Read more >>

Dead cats don’t bounce

03 October 2008 | Comments (1)
Dead cats don’t bounce Barely two months after releasing unrealistic capital spending projections for 2009, SEMI have slipped out news that 2009 doesn’t look like it's going to be bright as once (just) thought. I noted in this blog that things were worse than being painted by SEMI and that the memory manufacturers would remain cautious on spending until the mess they have created is sorted out. Read more >>

The white box is mightier than the semiconductor

18 September 2008
Semiconductor margins: iSuppliHow low can you go? That question has been asked by iSuppli Corp’s analysts after trawling over the financial figures coming out of semiconductor manufacturers (though not foundries). Read more >>

Semiconductor capital spending for 2009 hangs in the balance

15 September 2008 | Comments (1)
The latest round of capital spending and production cuts from the likes of Elpida, Hynix and Powerchip Semiconductor are a concern to Gartner and suppliers alike as they may impact the potential for a fourth quarter recovering in tool spending that should see a better capital spending environment develop in 2009. Read more >>