While Intel Corp. was reorganizing its operations to adjust for disappointments in its chip business, Texas Instruments Inc. was presenting an upbeat picture for the fourth quarter last week.
Looking forward, though, both companies say business is not bad. That is the metaphor for the semiconductor business, which seems to have pulled out of its despondency of the past few years and is looking at the future through rose-colored lenses.
One of the companies with high optimism is Samsung Electronics Co., which has surpassed most of the competition during the past five years, especially in the area of its NAND flash memory sales.
“Samsung had another excellent year with growth nearly twice that of the overall market,” said Jeremy Donovan, vice president of Gartner’s worldwide semiconductor group, which just completed research on semiconductors. “The company made a strategic decision at the start of 2003 to shift production from DRAM to NAND flash to take advantage of stronger average selling prices.”
Demonstrating the geographic breadth of the business, Advanced Micro Devices announced plans to establish a new joint development laboratory in Beijing, focusing mainly on home digital media centers. AMD also announced it will partner with BLX IC Design Corp. to open a center to deliver innovative reference designs.
“Building on our plans for growth in the Chinese market, we are pleased to partner with BLX to deliver superior solutions to customers and increase visibility of China designs worldwide,” said Karen Guo, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD China.
Analysts see Intel’s decision to bring its wireless Communications and Computer Group under a bigger organization known as the Intel Communications Group as a response to the lackluster performance of its wireless investments. The company said it lost about $600 million, pointing to the acquisition of DSP Communications four years ago as accounting for a big part of the deficit.
Intel, which has rolled out a slew of offerings and crafted an ecosystem around its products, decided to bring the WCCG under ICG, with a view to integrating the client side of its business with the networking side. So, ICG will add the XScale processor technology with chipsets, reference designs, software and other technologies to the network processors, wireless local area networks, gigabit networking solutions, network cards and related infrastructure technologies.
“We continue to drive the convergence of computing and communications through our product line-up, and with this we see wireless local area networking and wide area cellular technologies coming together,” said Intel Chief Executive Officer Craig Barret.
TI raised its fourth-quarter projected sales and earnings, highlighting the happy outlook for the industry. The company expects fourth-quarter earnings of 25 cents to 27 cents a share, which includes a gain of 7 cents a share from the sale of 32.3 million shares of Micron Technology Inc. TI expects revenue to be between $2.64 billion and $2.765 billion.
“Wireless is a significant part of the upside,” said Ron Slaymaker, vice president for investor relations for the company.
Underlining the prospect of business, major chipmakers, including TI, Intel and Analog Devices Inc., said they will keep their plants open during the holidays to meet high demand. Some of the demands are anticipated for wireless handhelds, especially camera phones.
On the amplifier front, Intersil introduced products it described as industry firsts. Intersil said it rolled out six new products it describes as the fastest low-noise amplifiers.
“Our new EL513x family of low-noise amplifiers has already evoked tremendous interest in instrumentation, communications receiver and pre-amplifier applications,” said Sameer Vuyyuru, Intersil’s director of marketing for video and op amps.
In the CDMA modular arena, Kyocera Wireless Corp. and International Road Dynamics announced what they see as the first integrated CDMA cellular module with global positioning system technology for Siemens’ fleet management system.
“With the integrated Kyocera 200 module, Siemens’ FM200 Plus provides a solid onboard computing platform for remote gathering of detailed data on vehicle use, driver accountability information, vehicle location and active events such as panic button alarms and geofence crossings,” said the companies.
Triquint Semiconductor also said it received the first purchase orders from a major Korean handset maker for its triplexer modules for CDMA. The handset vendor was not named.
