Popular Keywords
- About Us
-
Research Report
Research Directory
Semiconductors
LED
Consumer Electronics
Emerging Technologies
- Selected Topics
- Membership
- Price Trends
- Press Center
- News
- Events
Micron's Japanese plant at Hiroshima suffered a power outage on July 8. According to TrendForce investigations, this plant's monthly wafer starts accounts for approximately 30% of Micron's total monthly wafer starts in 3Q22. In terms of global wafers starts, this plant’s proportion of wafer starts is approximately 7%. The plant’s primary production process is 1Z nm, accounting for more than 50% of capacity, followed by 1Y nm, accounting for nearly 35%. Although machinery initiated the uninterruptible power supply system when the outage occurred, due to the voltage drop, plant machinery required initialization and inspection. The power outage persisted for approximately 5~10 minutes and the effect on production capacity was limited.
According to TrendForce investigations, foundries have seen a wave of order cancellations with the first of these revisions originating from large-size Driver IC and TDDI, which rely on mainstream 0.1Xμm and 55nm processes, respectively. Although products such as MCU and PMIC were previously in short supply, foundries’ capacity utilization rate remained roughly at full capacity through their adjustment of product mix. However, a recent wave cancellations have emerged for PMIC, CIS, and certain MCU and SoC orders. Although still dominated by consumer applications, foundries are beginning to feel the strain of the copious order cancellations from customers and capacity utilization rate has officially declined.
According to the latest TrendForce research, despite the rapid weakening of overall consumer demand in 1H22, DRAM manufacturers previously presented a tough stance on price negotiations and gave little ground, steadily conveying inventory pressure from buyers to sellers. Facing uncertain peak-season demand in 2H22, some DRAM suppliers have begun effectively expressing clear intentions to cut prices, especially in the server field, where demand is relatively stable, in order to reduce inventory pressure. This situation will cause 3Q22 DRAM pricing to drop from the previous 3~8% to nearly 10% QoQ. If a price war is incited due to companies competing for sales, the drop in prices may exceed 10%.
According to TrendForce research, observing recent server market dynamics, ODM’s prior production plans have begun to gradually cool. Since the material mismatch cycle has improved significantly, server motherboard suppliers' stocking momentum began falling off in 2Q22. At the same time, pandemic lockdowns in Shanghai have impacted the production of some ODMs. Particularly, enterprise orders led by Inventec have borne the brunt. Production plans including those of Dell and HPE have been significantly delayed but overall shipment performance will not be affected in the short term. Global server shipments are still forecast to grow by 6.5% QoQ in 3Q22, mainly due to continued support from demand generated by companies accelerating cloud migration post-pandemic.
According to TrendForce data, global wafer foundry capacity will increase by approximately 14% annually in 2022. Since expanding 8-inch capacity is not cost-effective and its growth rate is much lower than the overall industry average, 8-inch capacity will grow approximately 6% annually, while 12-inch capacity will grow 18% annually. Of this new capacity, approximately 65% of new 12-inch capacity will be in mature processes (28nm and above) with an annual growth rate of 20%. It is obvious that in 2022, most wafer foundries will focus on 12-inch wafer production capacity, with the main driving force behind production expansion coming from TSMC, UMC, SMIC, HuaHong Group’s HHGrace, and Nexchip.