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Chips off a new block
Can life get any worse for semiconductor makers? Market prices for their chips have steadily fallen even as the cost of building a new fabrication facility to produce increasingly complex products has soared—to $2 billion or more. Now the already reeling industry faces its biggest challenge yet in the form of a new generation of plastic-based semiconductors.
The take-away: Commodity chip makers, such as Hitachi, Rohm, and Toshiba, may suffer as the new technology takes hold, and so will manufacturers of chip-making equipment such as Applied Materials. The likely beneficiaries? Plastics and chemical companies (for instance, Dow and DuPont) and printer manufacturers (Canon and Hewlett-Packard).
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