Chips Lifted by Autos, Industrial, Data Center
The overall demand environment appears seasonal/healthy across geographies and end-markets.
This week, we hosted 18 semiconductor/semiconductor capital equipment companies at our 45th annual Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) Conference.
The general tone from this year’s conference was broadly constructive as the overall demand environment appears seasonal/healthy across geographies and end-markets, with disciplined inventory levels in the distribution channels and normal lead times. The automotive, industrial, and data center compute/networking end-markets continue to see strong growth, with automotive driven by increasing semiconductor content per car, industrial driven by factory automation, and data center networking continuing to grow on the 100G upgrade cycle and increasing requirements for more compute (and memory/storage) capabilities.
Additionally, we are beginning to see companies with data center businesses build on their existing product and intellectual-property (IP) portfolio to address the long-term opportunities in artificial intelligence (AI)/deep learning. Also, semiconductor equipment fundamentals remain constructive on 3D NAND (conversion/new capacity), DRAM (primarily conversion), and foundry investments (10 nanometer (nm)/7nm). Our equipment companies see strong growth in 2017 spending trends and continued spending strength into 2018. We would also note that demand for display equipment is also robust, led in part by both Gen 10.5 and OLED investments.
barrons.com
|
