The transition to a new type of computer-chip manufacturing will be too expensive for some manufacturers, giving market leader Intel Corp an edge, Intel vice president Patrick Gelsinger said.
Starting in 2012, the three biggest spenders on chip-production equipment — Intel, Samsung Electronics Co and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) — will begin using 450mm disks of silicon. The cost of the shift will pare the number of semiconductor manufacturers down to fewer than 10, Gelsinger predicted at a briefing on Monday in San Francisco.
“As we move from 300mm to 450mm, there will be a huge economic hurdle,” said Gelsinger, a former chip designer who now heads Intel’s largest business unit.
“There used to be hundreds of companies” with building fabrication plants, he said.
Intel’s budget for new plants and equipment climbed to more than US$7 billion in 2001 when it made its last big transition — to 300mm from 200mm. Its budget this year is US$5.2 billion.
Intel, based in Santa Clara, California, is the world’s largest chipmaker by sales, followed by South Korea’s Samsung. Taiwan Semiconductor, the largest contract manufacturer, makes chips for other companies.
In May, the three companies announced plans to ask equipment makers to provide products that can handle the new silicon wafers by 2012. Using the new machinery will let the companies cut their costs per chip by as much as 40 percent, Gelsinger said.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
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