According to reports from Taiwan, VIA Technologies and Silicon Integrated Systems cannot fulfill the demand on chipsets for mainboards, as in March both companies have been experiencing much stronger sales than originally expected.

Officials say that the main problem VIA has now is tight supply of VT8235 I/O processors. Only 60% to 70% of orders are fulfilled at the moment. Outdated VT8333 South Bridges were discontinued earlier this year, so, VIA trapped itself and now cannot even sell its North Bridges due to the lack of any I/O companions.

Despite of the fact that UMC now makes a part of core-logic products for SiS (see this news-story), the company still cannot fulfill the demand on its lower-end integrated chipset for Intel Pentium 4 platform, dubbed SiS650GX and SiS651.

In fact, this is not the first time when both chipset designers are not able supply all its customers with desired devices. Reportedly TSMC, the largest contract Taiwanese semiconductor maker, landed extra orders from VIA in December 2002 for making more inexpensive chipsets, such as VIA KT266A, VIA P4X266A and VIA P4M266A. SiS also placed extra orders on cheap products last year due to tight demand. Considering weak performance of SiS and VIA during the first two months of the year, rapidly growing demand on products in March could caught the companies napping.