The latest news has made us a little optimistic that the crisis in the semiconductor industry may come to an end at some point this year. It is not that we are going to contradict these statements, but thanks to new information, we have a better overview of what is happening and we can have a broader view of certain data. And it is that TSMC would have customer queues even for the oldest processes, is this really going to end in 2022?
There are no tokens, it’s a no-brainer, it’s a fact. Any industry, whatever it is, is compromised and the greatest and least graceful movement for the user requesting products is taking place. And it is that according to the latest information, manufacturers are abandoning the production of advanced or simply advanced nodes and designs and must take a step back.
TSMC has a customer queue – for old nodes!
In 2022, what we couldn’t even think of in 2020 happened: queues of customers competing for a tiny slice of the pie with the bigger ones for tokens. This might make sense if we see that Apple, AMD and NVIDIA have taken over, along with Qualcomm (and partly Mediatek), the quota that TSMC is able to throw daily, monthly and almost annually.
In other words, there are no 5 nm, 7 nm chips and there are no more 14 nm chips at TSMC. All production is reserved and now one must not lower one’s eyes, towards their reduction, but rather raise one’s eyes. Manufacturers are no longer looking for efficiency, performance and cost per wafer, it seems like it doesn’t matter given the current market situation where there is none, so the measures are extreme.
The 28nm on stage, we go back to 2011
None of the named nodes have capacity in 2022 and until the new batch FABs are completed there is not much to do and logically no manufacturer is going to withdraw from said quota allocated by TSMC, Intel or Samsung.
The problem is such that neither the node of 28nm Taiwanese can meet the demand, where many manufacturers have modified their designs to try to achieve the effective share of internal productivity marked by their customers. GlobalFoundries is oddly an option today, since all three chipmakers are above 100% of current capacity straining machines and working at full speed while waiting for new ASML scanners.
What is the scenario that we are going to see shortly given the customer queues at TSMC? Well, first, a change in the specs of many consumer products that aren’t great performers, and second, a supply that may not stabilize for another 6 months (hopefully). The most likely, being cautious, is that the balance between supply and demand will be reached at some point in the third quarter of the year, although there is also the uncertainty of the success of the new variant in China and Taiwan, which is already making a dent in business closures, not to mention the power cuts that are suffering in both countries.
