Intel Corp doesn't anticipate a chipset shortage that plagued the industry late last year to persist this year, because the company has taken measures to correct the problem, an executive at the world's largest chip maker said.
"The problem has partially been resolved," said Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's sales and marketing group.
"There was some tightness in [chipset supply] in Q1, but as we head into Q2, I think we are in balance," he told Dow Jones Newswires in a recent interview during a visit to Hong Kong.
Chipsets enable memory to communicate with a computer's microprocessor.
In the second half of last year, a shortage of Intel chipsets that support the next-generation of memory chips called double data rate 2 dynamic random access memory, or DDR2 DRAM chips, put a damper on memory-chip demand, leading to sharp price declines in the industry.
"The way we have alleviated that shortage is, we went out and made sure that we had third-party chipset capacity in place," Chandrasekher said.
"In particular, we partnered with third parties to make sure that they were licensed and producing sufficient chipsets to be able to match what we saw as the demand on our part," he said.
Chandrasekher declined to give the names of the third parties.
In addition, Chandrasekher said that Santa Clara, California-based Intel has, for the first time, begun making motherboards that feature non-Intel chipsets.
More ample supply of chipsets is good news for the memory-chip industry as it should help spur demand for DRAM chips.
The company plans to commercially launch three chips that are slated to be available in the third quarter: Woodcrest for servers, Conroe for desktops and Merom for laptops.
Chandrasekher also said that Intel continues to see more growth opportunities in emerging markets such as South Asia, Brazil, Latin America and the Middle East.
He said the Asia-Pacific region -- which currently is around 25 percent of the company's business -- is expected to account for around 40 percent or more by 2010.
"So we feel strongly that the emerging markets are going to be a pretty strong growth opportunity," he said.
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