Hi, Ian King here. This time, it's different.

If you believe the market, semiconductors are twice as important as they were five years ago. Companies have sold the message that everything from your fridge to your car needs the ability to think for itself stoking the demand for the tiny electronic components. That's clearly resonated and valuations have skyrocketed.

Yet amid that rush of new money, the voices of an older cynicism are getting louder. Simply put, in the past, chipmakers have generally never found a boom in demand that they couldn't ruin by turning into a supply glut. As the section of the technology industry where manufacturing matters the most, those downturns have been painful.

After a run of 30 percent gains in four of the past five years, chip stocks this year are on a less linear growth path and have flirted with losses. Even favorites such as Nvidia and Micron Technology have suffered precipitous drops when their earnings haven't met the loftiest of estimates.

This matters for the rest of technology in two ways. Building a chip takes time, typically around three months. Building and equipping a semiconductor plant takes a lot of time, more than a year. That's made the $400 billion industry's performance a leading indicator for the rest of technology. If Intel's server business isn't expanding, that might mean Amazon is less optimistic about its cloud business. If Qualcomm's wireless modem orders are slowing, maybe Samsung's confidence in the newest Galaxy smartphone's popularity is waning.

But more broadly, if chipmakers are right, that their products are driving a new age of innovation that's going to change the world, the good times will continue for everyone. If even mundane devices can now think and are connected, how long before they can run an app, generate data, sell a service and deliver an ad?

So should we be worried that there are signs that the current boom might be over? Hock Tan, the CEO of Broadcom, has made a fundamental bet that the years of expansion are over for the chip industry. Spending a fortune on trying to create new markets is folly and companies need to focus on what they're already good at. In the past four years he's been right and wrong. His acquisitions have helped reshape the industry and created huge shareholder returns. Where he's been wrong is that chipmakers have consistently outgrown the economy.

With typical bluntness, he told the audience at a Deutsche Bank technology conference last week that chasing spikes in growth is "delusion." Tax breaks and low interest rates have helped give U.S. companies in particular the confidence to upgrade their corporate networks. The surge in spending by companies such as Google and Facebook on data centers cannot continue indefinitely, he said.

"The fact it is, this level of data center spending can only last so long," Tan said. "How much do you need to build?"

According to at least one veteran technology investor, Dan Morgan of Synovus Trust, we may get a better picture this week on whether the boom is already petering out. Micron will report earnings on Thursday. Prices of memory chips have surged over the past two years driven by data-center demand. There are now signs that inventory is building and prices are falling, historically the harbinger of a downturn.

While the financial performance of an Idaho-based company that makes a somewhat esoteric component may not typically be on your radar screen, perhaps this week it should be.