According to TrendForce’s latest report, current RF front end component manufacturers are gradually turning to GaAs chips as their main material of choice, according to the functional requirements of the phone component in question. As 5G becomes more and more widespread, the number of RF components used will double compared to that of the 4G era. Both of these factors are expected to herald a new period of growth for the GaAs RF component market beginning from 2020.
According to the latest investigations by DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, although the US and China have reopened trade negotiations, US server-related imports from China still face a 25% tariff, thus server ODMs will still add production lines in Taiwan as scheduled to avoid risks. North American Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as AWS and Microsoft have already begun requesting collaborating ODMs to move their L6 (Level 6) server production lines to Taiwan to avoid potential tariff costs, whereas production plans for products shipped to non-US regions will remain as is.
DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, says that Tsinghua Unigroup’s official statement on June 30th has revealed its newly composed DRAM group, with Diao Shijing, former director of the Electronic Information Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as the group’s Chairman and Charles Kao as CEO. This forms a new milestone for China on the road to developmental independency of DRAM products after the US put JHICC on the Entity List.
Toshiba Memory Corp. (TMC) reported that its main NAND Flash production base in Yokkaichi, Japan, experienced a 13-minute power outage on June 15. All production facilities within the base (Fab 2, Fab 3, Fab 4, Fab 5, and Fab 6) were affected by the power outage, but we have yet to see all facilities return to normal operation as of now. An assessment by DRAMeXchange , a division of TrendForce , gives that wafer quotes will be pressured to rise in the short term due to this event, and there may be a rise in 2D NAND flash product prices and a slight shrink in price decline for 3D NAND flash products in the third quarter.
TrendForce has released its 1Q19 rankings for the top ten IC design companies worldwide by revenue, which showed only MediaTek maintaining a small growth among the top five as Broadcom, Qualcomm, Nvidia and AMD all showed declines. Nvidia declined the most by 24.4% YoY due to unfinished destocking.