TriQuint Semiconductor (Nasdaq: TQNT) got too much of a good thing in 2010.

Demand for TriQuint's radio chips was so high in the fourth quarter that the company had to ask a few customers to remove them from recent designs. TriQuint lost its chip slots in the Verizon (NYSE: VZ) version of the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone, though management indicates that was a voluntary decision (due to inability to meet high launch demand) rather than Apple's choice. Rival RF Micro Devices (Nasdaq: RFMD) has the opposite -- and much less pleasant -- problem as it tries to find more customers for its radio chips.

With demand outstripping TriQuint's ability to make the darn things, it should be no surprise to see the company's sales outstripping analyst projections -- $253 million of revenue landed at the top end of the company's own guidance and beat the Street by about $1.7 million.

But strong sales didn't translate into strong profits. TriQuint says it wants operating expenses below 25% of revenue, but a higher skew of mobile sales and the lower margins they contain caused weaker than expected earnings. Non-GAAP earnings more than doubled year over year to $0.25 per share, but analysts were hoping for $0.28 per share. These are golden days for the optical and wireless networking industries, after all, and in addition to mobile TriQuint ships chips into both of them.

Rather than relying on third-party chip foundries, TriQuint runs its own manufacturing facilities and has nobody to blame for capacity constraints but itself. Naturally, the company is spending heavily on factory upgrades -- $42.7 million in the fourth quarter was the highest single-quarter CapEx in nearly a decade.

If TriQuint can keep customer interest at this all-time high, those revamped production lines should remain pleasantly packed for a long time to come. The demand for the end products driving TriQuint's production squeeze, which are mainly smartphones and tablet computers, won't subside for years.

Fellow Fool Eric Bleeker put real money into this stock earlier this week. If nothing else, TriQuint surely belongs on your watchlist.