David Ditzel, chief executive officer of US chip designer Transmeta, strongly refuted rumors yesterday that his company had placed an order with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC,
According to market speculation, TSMC will make between six and eight million of Transmeta's Crusoe 3210 chips this year, but Ditzel dismissed those rumors.
"That's not true," said Ditzel, who was in Taipei yesterday for an upcoming trade show. "We have tested our chips in TSMC fabs and in other fabs around Taiwan, but we have not placed any orders."
Ditzel said IBM is already producing all the chips Transmeta needs for the time being.
Still, he said that by next year the company would take a hard look at Taiwan semiconductor foundries.
But industry analysts remain hopeful, saying an order from Transmeta "would be huge for Taiwan."
Andrew Teng (鄧安瀾), semiconductor analyst at Taiwan International Securities Corp (金鼎綜), noted that the market for Internet devices and notebook computers powered by Transmeta chips looks set to explode.
And because Transmeta is a "fabless" chip designer, Teng said, TSMC or another Taiwanese foundry would have the opportunity to take on this potentially big customer.
"Intel and AMD manufacture their own chips, but Transmeta outsources theirs," Teng said.
"If they choose a Taiwan fab for production, that would mean a lot for the company."
There's also a Transmeta trickle-down effect that may benefit Taiwanese companies.
According to recent reports, America Online and Gateway have tapped Quanta Computer (廣達電腦), the nation's largest notebook maker, to make 1 million Webpads.
The devices will use Transmeta's microprocessors.
Ditzel couldn't say what the value of the Internet device market would be. But he did note that except for notebook computers, Internet appliances that run on Transmeta chips is an entirely new market segment.
He also called attention to a Dataquest study that put PC sales last year at 130 million, with notebooks accounting for 20 percent.
In addition, Ditzel trumpeted the AOL-Gateway pact to make Internet appliances using his company's chips as "the single biggest Internet appliance deal of the year."
But Paul Meyer, an analyst at Credit Lyonnaise Securities, said Transmeta's bottomline-effect for Taiwan wasn't clear yet.
As far as semiconductors go, the volume produced by Taiwanese fabs isn't likely to be significant, Meyer said.
Foundries are already running at full capacity.
"The impact may be more substantial downstream," he said. "[Acer Labs] is doing core logic for Transmeta and another, Quanta, is manufacturing the Internet appliances that Transmeta chips are going into ... but it's unclear how much business there is to be done on that platform this year."
Meyer said there is likely to be less than one million Web pads produced in Taiwan this year. But in the future, he sees Internet appliances as having a powerful impact on the market.
"I'm very bullish on Webpads. I think you can equate them as sort of cordless phones for e-mail," Meyer said.
"But it's probably a next-year phenomenon."
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