{"id":225,"date":"2011-10-27T09:27:07","date_gmt":"2011-10-27T14:27:07","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T05:00:00","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/?p=225","title":{"rendered":"The top 20 ain\u2019t what it used to be"},"content":{"rendered":"

Looking back on data of the annual top 20 semiconductor companies since 1987, it\u2019s amazing how much has changed. In my last post<\/a> on this topic, I looked at all the companies that went bankrupt, spun-out, or merged their way into or out of the top 20 list. Change is definitely a constant in this field. Now, let\u2019s look at the makeup of the 2010 list of top semiconductor companies. Here is the list, as generated by iSuppli.<\/p>\n

1\tIntel Corporation
\n2\tSamsung Electronics
\n3\tToshiba Semiconductor
\n4\tTexas Instruments
\n5\tRenesas Electronics
\n6\tHynix
\n7\tSTMicroelectronics
\n8\tMicron Technology
\n9\tQualcomm
\n10\tBroadcom
\n11\tElpida Memory
\n12\tAdvanced Micro Devices
\n13\tInfineon Technologies
\n14\tSony
\n15\tPanasonic Corporation
\n16\tFreescale Semiconductor
\n17\tNXP
\n18\tMarvell Technology Group
\n19\tMediaTek
\n20\tNVIDIA<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to note that foundries are excluded from this accounting \u2013 their revenue is attributed to the companies placing the orders. Thus, this is a semiconductor product-based top-20 list, not a semiconductor maker-based top-20 list.<\/p>\n

And that distinction is obvious when looking at the make-up of the 2010 top-20. Six of the top 20 companies are fabless. Another seven are \u201cfab-lite\u201d, meaning they have stopped investing in new fabs or leading-edge manufacturing. That leaves just seven leading-edge semiconductor manufacturers in the top 20. Of those, four make mostly memory (80% of Samsung\u2019s revenue came from memory), two make mostly logic, and one (Toshiba) makes a fair amount of both.<\/p>\n

As a point of reference, if TSMC\u2019s revenue were attributed to TSMC rather than their customers, they would be in fourth place, just barely behind Toshiba. The next two largest foundries, UMC and GlobalFoundries, would find themselves near the bottom of the top 20.<\/p>\n

So, we have seven semiconductor manufacturers and three foundries that claim to still want to invest in leading-edge manufacturing capacity. That\u2019s a far cry from just 10 years ago, when all 20 of the top 20 semiconductor companies were committed to building new leading-edge fabs. And even this list of 10 companies can\u2019t really afford to play at the bleeding edge. Only five of them (Intel, Samsung, Toshiba, TSMC, and Hynix) have over $10B\/year in semiconductor revenue, probably the minimum needed to build that next $5B mega fab. Add EUV and 450mm wafers into the mix, and you can see that there will be very few players at this ultra-high end of manufacturing.<\/p>\n

It is conventional wisdom that the last decade has been one of extreme consolidation in the semiconductor business. Next, I\u2019ll look at the numbers to see how well that conventional wisdom holds up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Looking back on data of the annual top 20 semiconductor companies since 1987, it\u2019s amazing how much has changed. In my last post on this topic, I looked at all the companies that went bankrupt, spun-out, or merged their way into or out of the top 20 list. Change is definitely a constant in this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}