Taiwan's chip industry is feeling unappreciated

Tien Wu, chief operating officer of Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, has a problem: the brightest young people in Taiwan do not want to work in the island's signature business, chipmaking.

"All the college freshmen are asking, 'Why should I join the industry? I'd rather work for Facebook, Apple or Google,'" Wu said in an interview.

Taiwan, an island of 23 million people, is the world's biggest chipmaker. The industry generated about $63 billion in sales here last year - more than one-fifth of the global total, according to the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association. Made-in-Taiwan chips are major components in many of the world's PCs, smartphones, cameras and other gadgets.

Why, then, has chipmaking lost its allure? Many semiconductor companies in Taiwan struggle with low profit margins or even lose money. At the same time, Silicon Valley giants like Google and Apple, whose wizardry would be impossible without the continuing innovations of the semiconductor industry, are sitting on so much cash they do not know what to do with it.

"We're the guys in the hot room, forging the iron and taking the heat, and someone else is reaping the benefit," Wu said.

His lament was echoed by executives of other companies during a semiconductor trade show in Taiwan last week. So even as engineers toil at the latest technological breakthroughs in chip design and manufacturing, industry leaders are also wrestling with a bigger question: how can the semiconductor business grab a bigger portion of the profits it enables?

The issue is gaining urgency because one of the axioms of semiconductors may be about to break down, putting new financial pressure on the industry. According to Moore's Law, named after Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel, the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. But transistors are now packed so densely on chips that it may be technically impossible to go further without corrupting data, specialists say.

"Everybody is coming up against this," said Pascal Viaud, chief strategy officer of Yole Développement, a consulting firm in Lyon, France. "The industry is going to need to find new ways of creating value."

One approach is to stack transistors, creating so-called three-dimensional chips, rather than line them up side by side. Samsung Electronics of South Korea announced this summer what it described as the first mass-produced 3-D chips for flash memory, a major component in smartphones.

Although 3-D technology and other advances promise to lower the cost and increase the performance of consumer electronics, they make chip design and manufacturing more complicated and expensive. This has prompted semiconductor companies to rethink how the industry is structured.

Several business models are competing for primacy.

The giants of the industry, including Samsung and Intel, offer one-stop shopping - designing, manufacturing and packaging chips into integrated circuits that are sold to the companies that design and assemble finished phones, cameras and other products. Advocates of this approach, featuring chipmaking behemoths known as integrated device manufacturers, or IDMs, say it provides the financial scale and technological expertise to deal with the industry's challenges.

Another approach is more specialized, with separate companies handling different stages in the creation of an integrated circuit. Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, for example, packages and tests chips that have been made by so-called chip foundries and designed by others. Supporters of this approach say clients of electronics companies prefer to deal with more focused semiconductor contractors.

"Today, I can say with certainty that the IDM model is dead," said Ajit Manocha, chief executive of Global Foundries, a chipmaker in Milpitas, Calif., that was created from the manufacturing arm of Advanced Micro Devices four years ago.

Although semiconductor companies everywhere are wrestling with how they should be structured, it is particularly pertinent in Taiwan because of the industry's size and its relative fragmentation. Taiwan has been less affected by the rounds of consolidation that have concentrated the industry in a handful of big players elsewhere.

To try to cope with the new challenges, the biggest chipmaker on the island, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., or TSMC, long considered purely a foundry, has recently moved to add capabilities, like chip packaging.

United Microelectronics Corp., the second-largest foundry by revenue in Taiwan, has announced an alliance with International Business Machines to develop new technology, as well as investments in other chip companies.

Despite all the maneuvering, 2013 is shaping up as a pretty good year for chipmakers in Taiwan, with total revenue expected to rise to 1.87 trillion Taiwan dollars, or about $63 billion, up 14 percent from 2012, according to the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association. But the industry is volatile; two years ago, sales plunged 12 percent.

Some analysts see signs of a turnaround in memory chips, one of the weakest parts of the industry. Prices have been weak for years because chipmakers expanded capacity just as sales of personal computers, a big user of memory chips, began to slump. But consolidation has helped put capacity back in line with sales.

The vulnerability of the market to changes in supply and demand was demonstrated in early September when a fire at a plant in China that is owned by SK Hynix of South Korea, the second-biggest producer of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, chips after Samsung, caused prices in the spot market to surge as much as 20 percent.

The market for other chips, including those that serve as the brains of computers and mobile devices, has been steadier, helped by the global boom in sales of smartphones and other mobile devices.

Some executives say concerns about the structure of the industry are overblown. Instead of coveting the lavish profits of the Internet companies and mobile phone makers like Apple and Samsung, they say, chipmakers ought to work on developing new markets for their products in industries like automobiles and health care.

"It's about innovation," said Jack Sun, chief technology officer of TSMC. "We need to collaborate to create innovation together. Otherwise we won't be able to retire."

"So leave the software guys and the OEMs alone for now," he said, referring to the companies that assemble electronics devices, known as original equipment manufacturers.

© 2013, The New York Times News Service