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Future Horizons is expecting 8% growth in the semiconductor industry next year and, if the economy bounces back, it could be as much as 20%.

TI is shipping less ICs than its customers are using with disties preferring to run down their inventories than keep their stocks up.

Intel will have sales of $49.7 billion in 2011, up from $40.4 billion in 2010, giving it 15.9% of the total semiconductor market, says IHS iSuppli, and a 6.5% market share lead over second placed Samsung.

Semiconductor CEOs are making positive noises again. Samsung, Renesas, Qualcomm and AMD say they expect growth in Q4 - against analysts' expectations of a Q4 dip.

"This downturn is hitting industrial and communications while most downturns hit computer and consumer," says Dave Bell, CEO of Intersil.

Here, according to IC Insights, are the top twenty semiconductor  companies measured by 2011 revenues and their precentage growth or decline on the 2010 numbers:                 

What on earth is going on at HP? Now you see the TouchPad, now you don't, now you may see it again. HP is to make another batch of TouchPads. Don't know when, don't know the price, but more are coming.

It took 15 years for the IC market to grow from $10 billion in 1980 to $100 billion in 1995, according to Arizona analysts IC Insights.

It's becoming a habit for chip bosses to blame the US and EU debt problems for their woes. The bosses of NXP, TSMC and, now, Toshiba's semiconductor boss, have all pointed to sovereign debt issues as the reason for weakening sales.

Flash is good. Toshiba the inventor and (almost) joint No.1 supplier of NAND was the third largest IC supplier in Q1, while the NAND-less Elpida's revenues dropped 31% and the company slipped four positions down IC Insights' rankings to end up at No.17.

The semiconductor industry bellwether, TSMC, was spot on in its pre-earthquake forecast of -3% to -5% measured in NT$. The company came in at - 4.3%.

Between 1959 and 1984, one semiconductor company reigned supreme over the industry at No.1 - TI.  Will TI's unprecedented 25 years at the top ever be matched?

The SIA says January's sales of $25.5 billion were up 1.5% on December's $25.2 billion which is pretty sensational news when the Dec-Jan market change has been an average minus 17% for the last ten years.

The last time I reported that NXP had failed to grow in a 30%+ industry growth year, I was told that the proper comparison should have been between Q3 2009 (a very bad quarter for the industry) and Q3 2010 (a very good quarter).

It's been a long time coming. China's been trying vainly for 30 years to spawn an indigenous IC capability. Last year may have been the turning point.

We all know now that 2010 came in as a 34% growth year. But what were forecasters saying at the beginning of 2010?

Suddenly you can see why things went tits up for semiconductor industry customers last year - the market grew over 30% but fab capacity grew only 8%, according to SEMI, the trade body for the semiconductor manufacturing equipment industry.

'Tis the Season of Forecasts for the New Year and Reviews of Last Year, so I am very grateful to Mike Cowan, inventor of the Cowan LRA Model for forecasting the IC industry, for the following resume of what happened in 2010 and what is in store for 2011.