A good omen for the European IC industry is that it becoming an increasingly important customer for the world's No.1 silicon foundry, TSMC.
"In Europe, in Q1, we dropped much less than the figure for TSMC overall," says Maria Marced, European President of TSMC, "now
In 2008, TSMC grew its sales 30% in
Now you might think that being a better customer to TSMC is not necessarily a positive. To an extent it reflects
"We're seeing a lot of new ideas from
TSMC, the semiconductor industry's No.1 foundry, had revenues of over $1 billion in Q109 which was 3X the size of the revenues at the world's No.2 foundry, UMC, and about the same as the collective revenues of the ninth largest foundries after TSMC.
TSMC believes the semiconductor industry has turned upwards and plans to hire 30 per cent more process development engineers and 15 per cent more design technology engineers.
TSMC currently has 1200 process engineers, and 600 design technology engineers. Design technology engineers develop design flows and work with the EDA vendors and IP suppliers to prepare new generations of technology.
The upturn is going to come," says Marced, "Q2 is going to be very much on-track with our April guidance, and Q3 will be substantially better than seasonality would say." TSMC's April guidance was that it expected to see revenues up 80% in Q2 compared to Q1.
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.
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, starting in production next year, is 28nm.

Leave a comment