Intel suffered but AMD surged in 2006, iSuppli says

Press release, March 16; Rodney Chan, DigiTimes.com [Friday 16 March 2007]

It was a tale of two companies in the semiconductor industry in 2006, with leading chip supplier Intel suffering a revenue decline, while rival AMD nearly doubled its sales, according to iSuppli.

"For US microprocessor giant Intel, 2006 was the worst of times, as its global semiconductor revenue dropped by 11.1% from 2005," said Dale Ford, vice president of market intelligence for iSuppli. "The revenue decline, which was due to Intel's bleak performance in its core PC microprocessor and flash-memory businesses, erased nearly all of the company's sales gains from its strong year in 2005. Intel's 2006 revenue of US$31.5 billion was less than half a percentage point higher than its sales in 2004."

"For Intel's smaller US rival, AMD, 2006 was the best of times as it achieved a whopping 91.6% increase in revenue for the year, partly due to a major acquisition, but also because of strong gains in microprocessor market share," Ford added.

This robust increase in revenue caused AMD's ranking to rise to eighth place in 2006, up seven positions from the 15th rank in 2005.

The divergent performances of Intel and AMD came during a 2006 when global semiconductor industry revenue rose by 9.3% to reach US$260.2 billion, up from US$237.98 billion in 2005. This is slightly higher than the 9% growth iSuppli predicted in its preliminary market share estimate compiled in November and released in early December.

Intel in 2006 faced hard times in its microprocessor and flash-memory businesses, which together accounted for 83% of total company revenue last year. The company's combined microprocessor and flash revenue in 2006 fell to its lowest level since 2003 as Intel faced rising competitive pressure in those markets. The revenue decline resulted in Intel's market share falling to 12.1 percent, its lowest level since before 2000.

Meanwhile, AMD in 2006 gained PC microprocessor market share at Intel's expense. AMD's PC microprocessor revenue rose by 35.5% in 2006 and its market share in that product segment increased to 16.1%, up 5 percentage points from 11.1% in 2005.

AMD's revenue also was boosted substantially by its acquisition of graphics chip seller ATI Technologies in 2006.

Looking beyond Intel and AMD, 2006 was a banner year for the leading pure-play memory chip suppliers.

Memory supplier Hynix Semiconductor of South Korea leapt to the seventh-place position in 2006, up from 11th in 2005 as its revenue surged by an impressive 41.5%. Hynix's memory revenue growth of US$2.3 billion surpassed the US$1.8 billion memory sales increase posted by memory-chip leader Samsung Electronics in 2006.

Germany's Qimonda, a newly created pure-play memory company formed from the spin-off of Infineon's memory business, increased its revenue by 54.9% in 2006.

However, the fastest growing memory supplier in 2006 and the quickest expanding supplier among the world's top-25 chip sellers-was Japan's Elpida Memory. Elpida's revenue nearly doubled in 2006, rising by 98.6% from 2005. This caused the company's ranking to rise to 19th in 2006, up from 28th in 2005.

Memory ICs were the key segment driving the growth of the overall semiconductor industry in 2006, with revenue in this area rising by 22.7%. A stronger-than-anticipated revenue increase in the fourth quarter boosted annual growth for DRAM to 35.2% in 2006.

(c) www.digitimes.com

Uni.Technology Tags: Intel, AMD, Semiconductor, Toshiba, Samsung, Rating

No Longer "Made in Taiwan"

Innovation over simple contract manufacturing is the key to Taiwan's economic future, or demise

"Made in Taiwan," the label ingrained in every American, is quickly becoming an icon of the 90's rather than the everyday slogan it once was.

Contract manufacturing now sits in Taiwan’s rear view mirror as the country enters its first age away from just manufacturing. Taiwan’s industry was primarily based on manufacturing but since the late 1990's Taiwanese companies have taken the turn to cell phone development and PC designs, adding innovation to their list of operations.

Four Taiwanese manufacturers control over 70% of notebook manufacturing currently. The other Taiwanese notebook brands control another 10% of the manufacturing development. As early as 2001 the capacity in Taiwan to build notebooks all but vanished. The "Big 4" in notebook assembly builds exclusively in China.

One of the largest outsourcers to Taiwan is Dell, the world’s second largest PC maker. Over 50 percent of Dell's product development is done in its Taiwan branch according to CNET. That branch began with 50 employees in the early 2002 and currently has over 300.

Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute announced that Taiwan had overtaken Japan in mobile phone PCB production earlier this year. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC, has a 50% global market share for semiconductor foundries alone. Taiwanese manufacturers have nearly a 100% global market share for retail motherboards, power supplies, PC cooling and enclosures. However, there is a trend with all of these big Taiwan claims: virtually all of the production is done inside China.

Taiwanese companies were barred from manufacturing technology outside of Taiwan on less than 0.25 micron nodes until yesterday. The Taiwanese Ministry of Economic Affairsjust declared the 180nm node legall for Taiwanese-owned, Chinese-based manufacturing.

Even with all of these strong indicators that Taiwan has controlling interests in the world of PC manufacturing; investment analysts are already weary of Taiwanese companies in 2007. The TAIEX, or Taiwan Capitalization Weighted Stock Index, has lagged behind other Asian markets for five consecutive years -- about the same time the country began moving its manufacturing base from Taiwan to China.

(c) www.dailytech.com

Cheaper LEDs from breakthrough in ZnO nanowire research

SEM image of p-type ZnO nanowires created by electrical engineering professor Deli Wang at UC San Diego . Note: the blue color was added in photoshop. Credit: Deli Wang/UCSD

Engineers at UC San Diego have synthesized a long-sought semiconducting material that may pave the way for an inexpensive new kind of light emitting diode (LED) that could compete with today's widely used gallium nitride LEDs, according to a new paper in the journal Nano Letters.

To build an LED, you need both positively and negatively charged semiconducting materials; and the engineers synthesized zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoscale cylinders that transport positive charges or "holes" – so-called "p-type ZnO nanowires." They are endowed with a supply of positive charge carrying holes that, for years, have been the missing ingredients that prevented engineers from building LEDs from ZnO nanowires. In contrast, making "n-type" ZnO nanowires that carrier negative charges (electrons) has not been a problem. In an LED, when an electron meets a hole, it falls into a lower energy level and releases energy in the form of a photon of light.
Deli Wang, an electrical and computer engineering professor from UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering, and colleagues at UCSD and Peking University, report synthesis of high quality p-type zinc oxide nanowires in a paper published online by the journal Nano Letters.
"Zinc oxide nanostructures are incredibly well studied because they are so easy to make. Now that we have p-type zinc oxide nanowires, the opportunities for LEDs and beyond are endless," said Wang.
Wang has filed a provisional patent for p-type ZnO nanowires and his lab at UCSD is currently working on a variety of nanoscale applications.
"Zinc oxide is a very good light emitter. Electrically driven zinc oxide single nanowire lasers could serve as high efficiency nanoscale light sources for optical data storage, imaging, and biological and chemical sensing," said Wang.
To make the p-type ZnO nanowires, the engineers doped ZnO crystals with phosphorus using a simple chemical vapor deposition technique that is less expensive than the metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) technique often used to synthesize the building blocks of gallium nitride LEDs. Adding phosphorus atoms to the ZnO crystal structure leads to p-type semiconducting materials through the formation of a defect complex that increases the number of holes relative to the number of free electrons.

"Zinc oxide is wide band gap semiconductor and generating p-type doping impurities that provide free holes is very difficult – particularly in nanowires. Bin Xiang in my group worked day and night for more than a year to accomplish this goal," said Wang.
The starting materials and manufacturing costs for ZnO LEDs are far less expensive than those for gallium nitride LEDs. In the future, Wang expects to cut costs even further by making p-type and n-type ZnO nanowires from solution.
For years, researchers have been making electron-abundant n-type ZnO nanowire crystals from zinc and oxygen. Missing oxygen atoms within the regular ZnO crystal structure create relative overabundances of zinc atoms and give the semiconductors their n-type, conductive properties. The lack of accompanying p-type ZnO nanowires, however, has prevented development of a wide range of ZnO nanodevices.
While high quality p-type ZnO nanowires have not previously been reported, groups have demonstrated p-type conduction in ZnO thin films and made ZnO thin film LEDs. Using ZnO nanowires rather than thin films to make LEDs would be less expensive and could lead to more efficient LEDs, Wang explained.
Having both n- and p-type ZnO nanowires – complementary nanowires – could also be useful in a variety of applications including transistors, spintronics, UV detectors, nanogenerators, and microscopy. In spintronics applications, researchers could use p-type ZnO nanowires to make dilute magnetic semiconductors by doping ZnO with magnetic atoms, such as manganese and cobalt, Wang explained.
Transistors that rely on the semiconducting properties of ZnO are also now on the horizon. "P-type doping in nanowires would make complementary ZnO nanowire transistors possible," said Wang.

(c) www.physorg.com