Industry Expert Blogs

I attended the semi-annual SEMI Silicon Valley Lunch meeting last week. The semiconductor equipment people are the ones that really know what is going on. People can talk about capex numbers on conference calls but it is the equipment vendors who either do or do not get orders for particular types of equipment. In turn, the analysts that follow the equipment industry have a pretty good handle on where various technologies are.

One takeaway was that Intel's delay of a quarter or two in 14nm was just taken as a given during the lunch. Intel has the biggest capex in the industry (although actually TSMC spent more in the first half of the year) so changes in their spend affect everyone. Intel has reduced its expected capex for the year to $10B but the analysts were skeptical that they would be able to spend that much given that there are only 4 months left in the year.

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