Mike Magee over at TechEye, reports:

Foundry giant TSMC said that its factories are full up — issuing a "clarification" to remarks made when it turned in its first quarter results.
The form said: "The delivery of TSMC’s wafers to our customers are constrained by our current capacity. This is not an indication of customers’ end market demand."

TSMC is the world’s largest foundry, making chips for thousands of chip companies. The lack of extra capacity will affect many companies that haven’t already booked their orders.

Foundries have to run at near full capacity otherwise they lose huge sums of money. But adding additional production lines is incredibly expensive. State-of-the-art chip fabs can cost more than $4 billion.

[Editor’s Note: Tom cross-posted this at Silicon Valley Watcher. –mrh]