Semicon West was sluggish with hopes of 2020 recovery
by Robert Maire on 07-17-2019 at 6:00 am
Bouncing along a not too bad bottom
Given that we have followed the semiconductor industry through many down cycles, we can safely say that this one isn’t all that bad by comparison. Everyone, big & small, is still safely profitable and in relatively good shape. Though we are seeing the normal week long holiday shut downs typical of the downcycle we are not seeing wholesale layoffs or cuts. Its not all that painful (by comparison to past down cycles). While not busy and up beat , Semicon West was not the funeral we had experienced in past down turns.
The “new normal” will be different than the “old normal”
We think that when the industry does recover, it won’t be the rip snorting, maniacal memory spending we saw in the last up cycle. It will likely be more evenly balanced between memory and logic and we would not be surprised if logic/foundry led the way off the bottom rather than having a memory driven recovery.
There are likely those who would say that you can’t have a “real” recovery without memory (and we might be one of them…), but we could have some sort of recovery.
The past cycle was an almost perfect storm of memory spend, driven by the conversion from rotating media to SSDs, sucking up a tidal wave of NAND. At the same time, the industry was going through a massive conversion from 2D planar memory to 3D NAND, buying equipment in leaps and bounds. We are now well past the bulk of the SSD conversion as well as virtually 100% of the 3D NAND conversion, those waves have washed over the industry and subsided very quickly as the tide went out following them.
continues at semiwiki.com
I disagree with the author of this piece that we are "well past the bulk of the SSD conversion". Many desktops that are in use have not been converted yet and even many laptops are still being sold with HDs due to price and capacity (although I think a majority of those being sold now have SSDs). Here is one assessment of the respective current and future market shares of HDs vs SSDs: statista.com
If anyone has other numbers, I would be interested in seeing them. |
