On Monday morning, there will be a chip industry summit of sorts: the world's largest chipmaker and the world's largest chip foundry will make a strategic announcement at Intel headquarters in Santa Clara. Whatever the deal is, it's probably something TSMC needs more desperately than Intel does. With its smaller chip customers swooning, one has to imagine Tsai might cut Intel a pretty sweet deal to get any business the chip giant would like to send his way.

Intel and TSMC have scheduled a joint press conference on Monday (March 2), an unusual step for Intel, which has rarely outsourced any manufacturing to a third party. The event will be hosted by Intel execs Anand Chandrasekher, general manager of Intel's Ultra Mobility Group and Sean Maloney, the company's chief marketing officer. Both will be joined by TSMC execs Rick Tsai, TSMC's president and chief executive, and Jason Chen, TSMC's vice president of worldwide sales and marketing.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Tela Innovations has recently announced a strategic partnership to develop co-optimized design solutions using Tela's innovative and patented lithography-optimized design technology and TSMC's processes.

Reiterating the 'severe deterioration' in order intake caused by the global economic recession, lithography toolmaker ASML has announced that its 2008 fourth-quarter sales hit 494 million euros--a 29% drop from the previous quarter, and a 48% decline year-over-year. The quarterly sales fall within ASML's revised guidance, which the company announced last month along with reorganizing efforts that includes a layoff of 12% of its workforce. Full-year 2008 net sales were 2.95 billion euros, down 21.6% over 2007.

Silicon foundry giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) is mulling plans to buy ProMOS, according to sources. In the plan, TSMC would buy ProMOS' fabs and would shed the company's memory business, sources said.

Mentor Graphics has announced the qualification and immediate availability of its Olympus-SoC place-and-route system for chip designs targeting TSMC's 40nm process. These include the efficient 40nm (LP) process for handheld and wireless devices, and the 40nm General Purpose (G) for performance-oriented CPU, GPU, game consoles and networking devices.

Qualcomm's four-year, $350 million effort to design a chip that goes into small notebooks and handhelds will come to fruition next year when device makers deliver products based on the Snapdragon processor.

As downward revisions of December quarter guidances flow as steadily as pink slips this month, reports are swirling of company-enacted manufacturing plant shutdowns in what seems to be a heavy trend compared to previous years. Samsung, Spansion, TI, and TSMC are among those reportedly shutting down manufacturing sites at the end of the year for up to three weeks. Such action is nothing new...

A spokesperson from TSMC says that from December 2008, employees who work in TSMC's manufacturing departments will take as many as five unpaid days each month and those who work in other departments will take one unpaid day each week staring from January 2009. At the same time, the transport allowance that was previously paid to the company's managing staff will also be canceled.

Wafer shipments at the world's top two foundries, TSMC and UMC, are set to plunge further than anticipated in 4Q, but the picture for 1Q is even uglier with "historic lows" looming for utilizations, according to an analyst report.

Taiwan stocks opened 0.55 percent lower on Monday, pulling back from a more than two-week closing high, as tech shares fell after a Hon Hai subsidiary said it would cut staff in Hungary and industry sources said TSMC aimed to cut costs by 20 percent.

The world's top two contract chip makers, TSMC and UMC, are preparing to cut costs by up to 20 percent as their industry heads into a sharp downturn, industry sources said on Friday. Taking about a two-thirds share of the global foundry market together, the two Taiwan firms are facing a global economic slowdown that has forced consumers to cut spending on new PCs, cellphones and flat-screen TVs that require microchips.

The symbolism was hard to miss when the award was handed to Chang by Hector Ruiz, a longtime friend and the chairman of Advanced Micro Devices. AMD just became the latest U.S. company to make plans to divest its factories–to a new foundry venture that will compete with TSMC. “I never look at any competition lightly,” Chang said, but predicts problems for the new foundry because suppliers and customers will be far from its main locations.

For flat-panel makers, control over the supply of LED die appears to be a key strategic decision. But for a foundry company like TSMC, that argument is irrelevant. Any market entry for TSMC would only make sense if demand for LEDs with specific wavelengths and emission characteristics becomes huge. This could ultimately be the case in general lighting, where three or four individual chips might go into every solid-state lighting "bulb" for future domestic applications.

TSMC has pushed out or delayed its initial high-k/metal-gate offering until 28-nm. In contrast, IBM and its partners plan to offer what they claim is a better gate-stack solution at 32nm. As previously reported, IBM, Chartered and Samsung plan to offer a high-k and metal-gate solution for 32nm. The companies in IBM's fab club will not offer a SiON option at 32nm and beyond.

Nvidia Corp. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) seem to have a difficult relationship. Nvidia is not getting the 55-nm capacity it needs from the silicon foundry giant, a problem likely to worsen as the graphics chip maker moves to the 40-nm node, says Doug Freedman, an analyst at American Technology Research.

ontract suppliers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) and Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) will likely benefit from NXP Semiconductors' restructuring plan, which is underscored by closures of several chip-making factories and job cuts.

"...Nvidia is not getting the 55nm capacity it needs from silicon foundry giant TSMC, a problem likely to worsen as the graphics chip maker moves to the 40nm node..."

TSMC is to delay its 40nm process, a bit. It was originally scheduled to start shipping this year, just barely, but now it has been pushed out.

...With the low-power mobile market space as the high-growth market opportunity, IBM Vice President Gary Patton highlighted the differences between the high-k/metal gate process that IBM and its Fishkill process development partners will offer compared with TSMC’s announced plans to introduce a 32 nm transistor with a nitrided oxide (SION) dielectric and polysilicon gate...