The prices of computer DRAM chips are expected to rebound slightly this quarter on reduced supply after a drastic 13 percent decline over the past two months, market researcher TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said.
Overall this year, TrendForce expects the prices will continue to fall gradually as delays in the sale of Intel Corp’s new Boardwell chip set will overshadow the sale of new PCs in the third and fourth quarters, which are a seasonally strong period for the PC industry.
“PC makers hold conservative attitudes about seasonal demand in the second half of the year,” TrendForce analyst Avril Wu (吳雅婷) said in a report released last week.
Wu’s projection matches Nanya Technology Corp’s (南亞科技) previous forecast of a mild price decline this year, citing worsening supply constraints. Nanya Technology is the nation’s biggest PC DRAM chip supplier.
Shipments of desktop computers and laptop computers will shrink 6.6 percent this year to a total 276.7 million units from 296.1 million units last year, Gartner Inc forecast.
In contrast to uncertain PC demand, PC DRAM chip supply is expected to grow to tilt the supply-demand balance as the world’s major suppliers Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc are boosting chip production in the slack season, the research house said.
Besides, Micron is aggressively migrating manufacturing technology to 25-nanometer technology, which will worsen the oversupply, it said.
Thanks to fewer suppliers after industry consolidation, this year will still be profitable for PC DRAM chipmakers, Wu said.
Wu attributes this quarter’s price rebound to fewer supplies from South Korean memory chip giants Samsung and Hynix, which allocated more factory capacity to make memory chips to meet the rising demand in smartphones, while producing fewer PC memory chips.
On the demand side, Wu said he expects no notable growth in PC shipments next quarter.
The price of the mainstream DDR3 4-gigabit 512Mx8 eTT has plunged 13 percent to US$3.53 per unit lately, compared with US$4.05 per unit at the end of January, due to weak demand in the slack season, according to TrendForce.
The contract chip price dropped only about 6 percent as the price is usually negotiated once a month during the same period of time, the researcher said.
SPEED OF LIGHT: US lawmakers urged the commerce department to examine the national security threats from China’s development of silicon photonics technology US President Joe Biden’s administration on Monday said it is finalizing rules that would limit US investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology sectors in China that could threaten US national security. The rules, which were proposed in June by the US Department of the Treasury, were directed by an executive order signed by Biden in August last year covering three key sectors: semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies and certain AI systems. The rules are to take effect on Jan. 2 next year and would be overseen by the Treasury’s newly created Office of Global Transactions. The Treasury said the “narrow
SPECULATION: The central bank cut the loan-to-value ratio for mortgages on second homes by 10 percent and denied grace periods to prevent a real-estate bubble The central bank’s board members in September agreed to tighten lending terms to induce a soft landing in the housing market, although some raised doubts that they would achieve the intended effect, the meeting’s minutes released yesterday showed. The central bank on Sept. 18 introduced harsher loan restrictions for mortgages across Taiwan in the hope of curbing housing speculation and hoarding that could create a bubble and threaten the financial system’s stability. Toward the aim, it cut the loan-to-value ratio by 10 percent for second and subsequent home mortgages and denied grace periods for first mortgages if applicants already owned other residential
EXPORT CONTROLS: US lawmakers have grown more concerned that the US Department of Commerce might not be aggressively enforcing its chip restrictions The US on Friday said it imposed a US$500,000 penalty on New York-based GlobalFoundries Inc, the world’s third-largest contract chipmaker, for shipping chips without authorization to an affiliate of blacklisted Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯). The US Department of Commerce in a statement said GlobalFoundries sent 74 shipments worth US$17.1 million to SJ Semiconductor Corp (盛合晶微半導體), an affiliate of SMIC, without seeking a license. Both SMIC and SJ Semiconductor were added to the department’s trade restriction Entity List in 2020 over SMIC’s alleged ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex. SMIC has denied wrongdoing. Exports to firms on the list
ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip assembly and testing manufacturing (ATM) service provider, expects to double its leading-edge advanced technology services revenue next year to more than US$1 billion, benefiting from strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips, a company executive said on Thursday. That would be the second year that ASE has doubled its advanced chip packaging and testing technology revenue, following an estimate of more than US$500 million for this year. ASE is one of the major beneficiaries from the AI boom as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is outsourcing production of advanced chip
RSS