Such applications stimulating exorbitant high demand for semiconductors aren’t in sight yet. Bluetooth is not, and neither UMTS (3G phones) nor others such as the automotive ground. Even if some pundits are pondering about all these areas of application and their chip demand (which is of course there), there is not a single killer application to be seen; instead, it’s just a steady movement from many different positions with some single peaks. Therefore, semiconductor revenues are bobbing up and down momentarily, expecting a flat semiconductor equipment business.
Studying the results from half a dozen semiconductor market forecasts of the main global researchers for the time span 2001/2002, it’s interesting to see that the expected slump with 31 to 34% wasn’t widely diversified, but the uncertainty on which it’s based is referenced from -12 up +10%, depending on the research firm. And that’s a lot. Such a swing in forecast uncertainty (besides, a thousand of bucks are charged annually for these studies), doesn’t provide an easy bench for both the semiconductor and the equipment manufacturers. They have to be more awake, analyzing every dizzy feedback from the markets, in order to react immediately.
The long predicted move to 300mm wafers, which would create immense demand for equipment, is a stepwise development, not a quantum leap in the commerce of the equipment suppliers. The reasons are obviously clear: minimized chip demand could be easily fulfilled with the current 200mm fab lines or smaller. They are based on mature and proven process technologies, one guarantee for the needed high yield figures. Nevertheless, it’s both a frightening and opportunity-providing quantum leap on the technology side. The huge investments in the design of equipment and the development of production processes take a lot of money and time. And for the needy semiconductor companies it’s not easy to finance these expenses.
But thanks to the monopoly world of PC operating systems and office programs, where an absolutely dominating company brings another (yet not a really new) version of its memory-greedy software to the users every year, the requirements of bread-and-butter PCs are being drastically inflated. PCs are, for example, in ongoing need of ever-increasing microprocessor cycles. If not regularly updated in hardware and software, we are not able to run “simple” everyday PC programs, which are overblown, like text editors, spread sheets, etc. Currently, even normal PCs have to be well-equipped with RAMs of 256 up to 512 Mbytes, and a processor running with more than 1GHz seems a must. Also graphic chips, which are special imaging-processing engines, are continually pushed onto the leading edge. These PC-based trends also call for a continuous basis flow of sophisticated and expensive semiconductors, except in the case of RAMs which are subject to exceptional rises and falls of market prices, according to the known trade mechanism of supply and demand.
Regarding this situation, and taking the gross domestic product (GDP) of different countries or areas as a pointer for the remedy into which the industry puts it hope, only Asia/Pacific and Europe expected to be in plus in 2002, not the US and not Japan. So why do all these European governments wait for US recovery? They have to boot their domestic economies themselves, or play the foolish banana republic game just a bit longer. A little more self-confidence seems necessary.
Gerhard B. Wolski
