Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

The electronic materials consultancy, which provides business and technical information, announced that the market for silicon wafers for semiconductor applications, including SOI wafers, will grow to US $16 billion in 2022, up about 12% from US $14.2 billion in 2021. Meanwhile, global wafer shipments are expected to hit an all-time high of 6 per cent to 15.1 billion square inches.

However, given the available capacity limits to increase production, the growth in shipments will basically be "capped". As semiconductor electronic materials consultancy TECHCET explained in the 2022 Silicon Wafer key Materials report ™, the expansion of any "brownfield" (urban land to be redeveloped) is limited, but suppliers' new "greenfield" capacity will not have any significant impact until 2024.

Dan Tracy, senior director of TECHCET, said: "revenue growth in 2022 will be stronger than shipments because of higher average sales prices and the popularity of products with leading logic and memory production." As the top five silicon wafer suppliers have announced that they will expand "greenfield" capacity, this higher wafer pricing is crucial for suppliers to support capacity expansion. At the same time, these large investment projects cost $2 billion or more and will take more than two years to go into production, which means that there will not be any significant capacity increase until around 2024-2025.

Before that, the industry will need to achieve through incremental "brownfield" capacity expansion. TECHCET predicts a slowdown next year, which means 2023 could be an opportunity to ease supply and demand tensions in the silicon supply chain.

It is worth noting that head wafer suppliers are considering large-scale factory investment in the United States. In the past, major investment prospects for the United States were minimal, given the industry trend of new fabs being built mainly in the Asia-Pacific region. However, with the US Chip Act finally signed into law, it has become a more realistic possibility to support the US semiconductor manufacturing supply chain through new silicon wafer plants. For example, GlobalWafers announced in July that it would build a new plant in Sherman, Texas, and the project is expected to continue with the Chip Act and other government support and funding.

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