The UK EE Times put the fear-of-God falsely into a lot of Engineering VPs
today with the dreaded headline "TSMC puts customers on allocation".  It's
like the Wall Street Journal with a headline of "NASDAQ drops 50 percent".

Allocation is every chip design house's nightmare.  Bust your ass staying up
late nights to get your baby designed and debugged -- and then the fab comes
back saying you'll have to wait many months before they can manufacture it
for you -- all while your competition is selling *their* chip to *your*
customers like hotcakes!

Why is this a false alarm?  Because the TSMC allocation scare only impacts
180 nm designs, a mature node with lots of 2nd source capacity at other fabs.
Also the use of 180 nm is small and it's going down.  Here's the node use
data from March 2004 (26 months ago) from SNUG 04 #1.

                      250+ nm  # 3%
                       250 nm  ## 4%
                       180 nm  ####### 15% <---- look here
                       150 nm  ### 6%
                       130 nm  ########################## 52%
                        90 nm  ########## 21%
                        65 nm  # 3%

Now the node use data from March 2005 (14 months ago) from SNUG 05 #1.

                      250+ nm  # 1%
                       250 nm  # 1%
                       180 nm  ##### 11% <---- look here
                       150 nm  ## 5%
                       130 nm  ###################### 44%
                        90 nm  ################# 34%
                        65 nm  ## 3%
                        45 nm  # 1%

Knowing this, I'm willing to bet dollars-to-donuts that the percentage of
customers designing at 180 nm now, 14 months later, has dropped down to
around 7% to 8% -- or even less!

Simply put, this 180 nm allocation "problem" is really a TSMC issue; it's not
something most (as in 92%) of designs have to worry about.  False alarm.