MediaTek is committing to open a new semiconductor design center at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, accepting a state “transition assistance package” from the Indiana Economic Development Commission, said the chipmaker Tuesday. “We believe strongly that being in Indiana means we’ll have access to some of the best engineering talent in the world,” said MediaTek USA President Kou-Hung Loh. MediaTek hopes to hire 30 engineers in West Lafayette and up to 10 graduate student interns by 2025, it said.

GlobalWafers will start construction later this year on a fab in Sherman, Texas, that will produce 1.2 million 300-millimeter wafers a month and support up to 1,500 jobs when it’s fully operational after 2025, said the Taiwanese chip company Monday. Most 300-millimeter silicon wafers are the “starting material” for all advanced semiconductor fabs, it said. The wafers are typically manufactured in Asia, but the Sherman investment “will represent the first new silicon wafer facility in the U.S. in over two decades and close a critical semiconductor supply chain gap,” it said. The GlobalWafers investment "is critical to rebuilding the domestic semiconductor supply chain, strengthening our economic and national security, and creating U.S. manufacturing jobs,” said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in a statement.

Congress should be able to pass its chips package in July, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Tuesday (see 2206150075). They issued a joint statement after a bipartisan, bicameral four corners meeting on Congress’ China bill. “We expressed our belief that there is no reason that we should not pass this bill through Congress in July,” they said. “Democrats have already made accommodations in the name of reaching an agreement, which we are optimistic can happen soon.”

Shortages of raw materials exacerbated by the war in Ukraine will push semiconductor production equipment into extended lead times of up to 18 to 30 months, compared with pre-COVID-19 pandemic lead times of three to six months, reported TrendForce Wednesday. Its current observations suggest the delay of semiconductor equipment will have a “relatively marginal” impact on foundry expansion plans this year, “with the bulk of repercussions arriving in 2023,” it said.

A German think tank's semiconductor specialist told the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission he's concerned that the policy focus on bringing more production back to the EU or U.S. won't achieve its aims because policymakers aren't sure what those aims are. "We have to be very clear about the objective," Jan-Peter Kleinhans, technology and geopolitics project director at Stiftung Neue Verantwortung in Berlin, testified Thursday at a commission hearing on supply chains and China. "Is it national security, is it technological competitiveness or is it global supply chain resilience?" If the objective is security, it's most important to develop packaging and printed circuit board capabilities, not fabs, he said, but those functions are labor-intensive, and can't be done economically in Germany or the U.S. If resilience is the top priority, Kleinhans said, policymakers need to understand that the recent chip shortages "were not the result of our dependence on China or East Asia," but because companies significantly underestimated demand. 'We need the end users at the table," he said. The Commerce Department should be asking big chip purchasers what cost differential they're willing to pay for a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. wafer made in Arizona rather than Taiwan, he said. "If you cannot get a very specific answer to that rather simple question, you will have a hard time to come up with sustainable business cases for these newly established fabs," Kleinhans said.

Not much has changed in the way Qualcomm has talked about industry supply constraints, Chief Financial Officer Akash Palkhiwala told a Bank of America investors conference Wednesday. “We're probably one of the companies that started talking about the constraints much before anyone else,” he said. “We have a good sense of what's going on in the industry, and so that has allowed us to react quickly.” When the supply constraints happened, Qualcomm “put in place a very aggressive plan to do multi-sourcing, to work with our suppliers, to increase capacity, and that has allowed us to radically improve our performance in terms of supply over the last couple of years,” he said. In 2022's second half, “we expect demand and supply to reconcile to a large extent,” said the CFO. “We always thought it would be a combination” of supply improving and demand declining “a bit.” he said. “Those two were required to get to equilibrium.” The COVID-19 lockdowns in China were “obviously, very unfortunate,” but those affected demand to such an extent that they helped Qualcomm “get into supply equilibrium sooner,” he said.

Global semiconductor revenue is expected to reach $661 billion in 2022, a 13.7% year-over-year increase from strong 2021 results, reported IDC Wednesday. The leading growth applications in 2021 were 5G smartphones, game consoles, wireless access points, data centers and wearables, and IDC expects those to continue growing in 2022 “but more moderately as a whole as consumer-facing markets begin to see a slowdown” by Q4, it said. Semiconductor supply constraints had the most impact on end markets served by mature process nodes, with manufacturers “slowing down production lines or slowing the introduction of new products and features” to cope with the shortages. IDC expects front-end manufacturing to meet demand by Q3, but back-end manufacturing and the materials supply chain are “extending lead times and extending shortages until the end of the year and into the first part of 2023,” it said. For 2022, IDC sees “continued resilience” in semiconductor sales worldwide, but challenges that will create headwinds for the global economy include inflation and the fiscal policies to address it, plus the COVID-19 shutdowns in China and the impact of the Ukraine-Russia war, it said. With Shanghai beginning to relax restrictions and open at the end of June, coupled with stimulus policies to restart the economies in cities under lockdown, the Chinese economy could “moderately recover” in 2022's second half, it said. IDC forecasts that global semiconductor industry revenue will rise by a 4.93% compound annual growth rate through 2026.

Intel is “seeing things get better” in the semiconductor supply-demand imbalance, but “we still see a year-plus -- 2023, maybe even into 2024 -- before we see the normalization of the supply chain,” Todd Brady, vice president-global public affairs and chief sustainability officer, told a Goldman Sachs investor conference Tuesday. “So there's still a lot of work ahead of us” in trying to balance the supply-demand equation, he said.

Global revenue from tablet apps processor shipments grew 12% in calendar 2021, with Apple holding a commanding 62% share lead, reported Strategy Analytics Tuesday. Intel and Qualcomm were second and third, with 12% and 10% share, respectively, said SA. Unit volume declined 8% on weaker demand for low-end processors but was 13% higher than in 2019, it said. The 21% increase in average selling prices helped the market generate revenue growth, despite the lower unit volume, due to a higher mix of more premium processors, it said.

Revenue in Marvell Technology’s consumer end market was $178.5 million in its fiscal Q1 ended April 30, growing 7% year over year, said CEO Matt Murphy on a quarterly earnings call Thursday. Robust demand for solid-state-drive controllers is driving the growth in Marvell’s consumer segment, “partially offset” by declines in its PC hard-drive business, he said. Revenue in Marvell’s consumer market declined 4% sequentially from Q4, “below our forecast for a flattish outlook, due to a reduction in demand” for PC hard drives, he said. “While we are not the bellwether of global PC demand as it represents a relatively small amount of our revenue, we did see a rapid change in tone from the PC market, and we expect the weakness to continue,” he said. From Marvell’s “perspective,” the shift from hard drives to solid-state drives in the notebook PC market is “almost complete,” he said. Q1 revenue in Marvell’s carrier infrastructure end market, including 5G, was $252 million, up 5% sequentially and 50% year over year, said Murphy. That was on top of a “sequential step-up” of more than 30% in Marvell’s 5G business in its fiscal Q4, he said. “The growth in 5G deployments, combined with Marvell product ramps at multiple base station customers, continues to fuel strong growth in this end market.” Revenue in the carrier end market for fiscal Q2 ending late July is expected to grow by high-single digits sequentially and by 40% year over year, he said.