The Japanese government on May 23 announced to impose export restrictions on 23 items of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, effective July 23. Although the list includes various equipment, Japan is more likely to control the export of photolithography or thin film deposition equipment for advanced processes.
The four leading foundries in Taiwan - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), United Microelectronics (UMC), Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing (PSMC) and Vanguard International Semiconductor (VIS) - together generated a total of US$89.4 billion in revenues in 2022, soaring 31% from a year ago. However, they still experienced the first on-quarter revenue decline since the COVID-19 pandemic in fourth-quarter 2022.
China-based semiconductor manufacturers, in the wake of geopolitical risks, are expected to keep up with their capacity expansion strategies going into 2023 with a good number of projects already in construction.
Logic IC manufacturing process technologies have been making rapid advances with lithography technologies and machines, transistor architecture and power delivery network (PDN) design all playing vital roles in driving the advance.
US government's Export Administration Regulations (EAR) are expected to set back China's progress in AI and supercomputer research and weaken its technological and military strength which otherwise could be empowered by its semiconductor advances.
Global foundry revenue is set to reach US$137.2 billion in 2022, soaring 25.8%, and the brilliant performance is a result of price hikes, customer long-term agreements (LTA) and capacity expansions.
Soaring silicon carbide (SiC) demand from electric vehicles (EV) is leading to a tight supply of 6-inch SiC wafers, of which the cost will unlikely go down.
The four leading Taiwan-based foundries - TSMC, UMC, PSMC and VIS - together are on course to generate revenues exceeding US$90 billion in 2022, soaring 31.8% from a year ago.
The global wafer foundry industry embraced brisk market demand and raked in a total of exceeding US$100 billion in 2021 revenues, representing an on-year growth of 26%.
DIGITIMES Research believes Intel investing in advanced process technologies and restarting the foundry services business are strategies that are able to complement each other.
The top-4 Taiwan-based foundries - TSMC, UMC, PSMC and VIS - together generated an aggregated total revenue of US$19 billion in fourth-quarter 2021, up 6% from a quarter ago, taking their combined whole-year 2021 revenue to top US$68 billion, up 26% from a year ago.
Hybrid bonding and other new advanced assembly techniques widely used for smartphone application processors (AP) and high-performance computing (HPC) chips will continue to expand advanced packaging technologies.
