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But, eventually, you have to do something. Your main rival, Samsung, can make its own chips. You can’t.
Semi-Accurate, which is more usually accurate than not in my experience, says Apple has bought a substantial stake in a fab company.
The speculation is that this is UMC or GloFo. The latter would make more sense because it has a brand spanking new fab in New York while UMC has slipped behind the leading edge.
A few of Apple’s billions could get UMC up to speed again, but GloFo would be more controllable. And Apple likes control.
You would think that, to a manufacturing company, it would be so much more attractive to spend some of your cash on securing leading-edge fab than giving the cash back to shareholders.
Yes it’s very brave to brag about being a good forecaster in the semiconductor industry. GloFo seems to be a law unto itself rather than subject to the laws of economics. As to Apple wirh $150 billion it can afford to build and run its own fab. You’d have to have big brass balls to make that call, though, and the boss doesn’t look as though he’s got them.
Mr. Nenni thinks NO: http://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/2585-where-will-apple-manufacture-next-iphone-brain.html and takes the opportunity to crow about his “better record on being right than my counterparts in regards to the fabless semiconductor ecosystem”. Either way, all very interesting.
As for the brand spanking new fab in NY I’m still puzzled about the strategy: is GloFo expected to run three different processes — bulk, PD-SOI and FD-SOI — in parallel,,, in each fab or across fabs? Is either really viable?
Sorry if this posts twice but I;m still not clear how the current WordPress(?) system works.