TSMC had a terrific year in Europe in 2008 with sales growing 30%. Europe now accounts for 11% of TSMC's total worldwide sales compared to 9% in 2007. Europe's 30% growth contrasts with the Taiwan-based semiconductor manufacturer's worldwide growth of 3.3%.
"We're seeing a lot of new ideas from Europe, and a lot of new applications, and we're glad to be enabling that creativity in Europe," Maria Marced, president of TSMC Europe, told Electronics Weekly.
When asked for examples, Marced replied: "Siano, which is doing mobile TV and have been designed in by Dell; Omnifone, which has a chip that facilitates DRM (digital rights management) during information transfers; CamSemi in power management control; Amimom, the wireless HD digital connectivity specialist; Sequans, a leader in Wimax; Icera, the wireless soft modem company which has won two big design-ins; and Movidia, the mobile video processor company."
Questioned whether growth was coming from Europe's IDMs which are going fab-lite, or from fabless companies, Marced replied: "Most of the growth came from the top four." That's STMicroelectronics, NXP, Infineon and CSR.
Infineon and NXP aren't running any processes better than 90nm, so are putting out an increasing number of wafers to foundry. Moreover, TSMC expects "very significant volumes from ST this year", said Marced.
For 2009 he said: "No one has visibility about what is going to happen. Some customers are saying they'll only have a half year plan because they don't know about the second half of the year."
Capex in 2009 is going to be restricted to work on bringing up volume production on 40nm and investing in R&D and tools for the 28nm and 22nm nodes.
TSMC is expecting a tough year ahead. "When the market is up the foundries do better than the industry as a whole, and when the market is down, the foundries do worse," said Marced. "Everyone is depleting inventories, there are very thin inventories everywhere. Our view is that the industry will suffer a high single digit shrink, and the revenues of TSMC will do worse than that."
Asked if TSMC felt it was on a par with Intel in its processing capability, Marced replied: "We're both on 45/40nm in mass production." TSMC has taken to majoring on slightly finer geometry processing than the industry mainstream so, while the industry mainstreams on 45nm, TSMC is running 40nm as its major process.
Explaining why, Marced said: "We saw the possibility of moving to 40nm and thought we would pass on this benefit to our customers."
The same thing is happening at the next node. While most of the industry see the next major node at 32nm, for TSMC the next major process node is 28nm.
Asked if it's possible to get an edge in process technology over the rest of the industry when the equipment comes from a limited group of suppliers, Marced replied: "The tools are available to everyone at the same time. It depends on who has the business model that allows the investment and the R&D, and who has the capacity to justify it. So it depends more on the business model than getting access to the technology."
Questioned about whether TSMC was considering buying the 60% share of Singapore foundry Chartered Semiconductor, which is rumoured to be touted for sale by the Singapore investment house Temasek, Marced said: "Those rumours have been around for three months. With more than 50% market share, the Trade Commission would be looking into us with this kind of transaction."
TSMC is expecting a boost from the sales of netbooks. "We believe we have a lot to offer", said Marced. "We believe in the convergence of computing and communications and our technology is ready for the convergence. We can offer high performance computing processes together with low power communications processes."
Responding to whether this means TSMC’s netbook chip-set customers will be giving the Intel Atom a run for its money, Marced replied enigmatically: "Intel will have to change their business model to compete in the netbook market."