Qualcomm will try its best to overcome the problem of chip shortages

Since the end of last year, many car companies around the world began to lack the necessary control chips, which caused some car companies to have to suspend part of their production lines to wait for the supply of chips.

And the shortage problem is naturally not only affected by car companies, in fact, whether it is desktop processors, graphics cards, or smartphone processors are also potentially affected.

As a smartphone chip manufacturing giant Qualcomm is also facing supply problems. After all, Qualcomm is mainly responsible for chip research and development and then handed over to the fab for foundry production.

There is even news that some Chinese mobile phone manufacturers have begun to transfer orders to MediaTek because Qualcomm’s supply problems are more serious and can only be transferred to MediaTek for support.

Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said that for the time being, the tight supply of mature technology chip products is expected to be alleviated in the short term.

The mature process products here mainly refer to the 14/28 nanometer and earlier nodes. The demand for these products was not particularly strong in the past, so the supply problem is not bad.

What’s worse is that advanced products, especially the current flagship processors of smartphones, etc., use most of the 7/6/5 nanometer nodes themselves to produce very tight capacity.

The production capacity of such products is now tighter and may not be alleviated in the short term. Qualcomm frankly needs more time to overcome the production capacity of advanced process products.

The inability to alleviate the shortage in the short term will inevitably have an impact on Qualcomm’s supply and Qualcomm’s financial reports.

Despite the serious core shortage problem, Qualcomm still emphasizes that the company will not invest in its own wafer fabs. Qualcomm mainly relies on TSMC and other chip foundries.

The reason for the unwillingness to invest in wafer fabs is that it takes several years. Therefore, investment in the construction of wafer fabs cannot alleviate the core shortage.

Qualcomm said that to solve the problem of chip supply, it still needs to rely on existing semiconductor foundries, which may gradually increase overall production capacity.

The fact is true. TSMC is currently planning to build more wafer fabs. For TSMC, a foundry professional, it will be more efficient to build new wafer fabs.

In the gradual investment in more fabs, the back-end TSMC will gradually increase its production capacity, but it will take time for the new factories of various foundry companies to start production, so they can only continue to wait.

Via: Reuters