TSMC OIP: Chip Industry Growth Blows Past Forecast

What it means for hiring

At TSMC's Open Innovation Platform forum, TSMC North America CEO Sajiv Dalal said the semiconductor industry will reach about 1.7 trillion dollars in revenue by the end of 2026, with more than a trillion of it from AI. In January 2024 the industry forecast was about a trillion dollars by 2030. TSMC's own revenue was up 53 percent year on year in August, new tape-outs at N5, N3 and N2 have grown fourfold, and TSMC says inference token usage has grown 500 times in three years. Broadcom said OpenAI's custom AI chip went from kick-off to tape-out in nine months.

If the industry is four years ahead of its own forecast, the talent plans made on that forecast are four years behind. Nine months from kick-off to tape-out on a leading-edge custom chip needs large, experienced teams in architecture, physical design, verification and packaging working in parallel, and the people who have done it are mostly at a few hyperscalers, Broadcom, Marvell, NVIDIA and TSMC's design partners. European companies building AI or automotive silicon are competing with those employers for the same engineers, often at lower salaries. The realistic answer is to recruit people one step earlier in their careers, and to be very clear about the ownership and scope the role offers that a large team cannot.

Read the original at Semiconductor Engineering .