According to TrendForce research, sales of electric vehicles (EVs) that can be externally charged or refueled such as BEVs, PHEVs, and FCVs are estimated to exceed 25% of global new vehicle sales by 2025. The main driving force in the market comes from accelerated worldwide decarbonization. In order to meet the goals of carbon neutrality, nations and corporations will eliminate internal combustion vehicles that are highly dependent on fossil fuels and also major carbon emitters.
In order to further improve the power performance of electric vehicles (EV), major global automakers have focused on a new generation of SiC (silicon carbide) power components and have successively launched a number of high-performance car models equipped with corresponding products. According to TrendForce research, as more and more automakers begin to introduce SiC technology into electric drive systems, the market for vehicle SiC power components is forecast to reach US$1.07 billion in 2022 and will climb to US$3.94 billion by 2026.
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 research, weak terminal demand debuting at the start of this year has led to a steady uptick in inventory pressure. In order to effectively control inventory, IC stocking momentum has trended conservative. Demand also reversed quickly for peripheral ICs that were in short supply in 2021 such as driver ICs, Tcons, and PMICs for panels, causing panel makers' demands on panel driver IC pricing to drop even more in 3Q22. With supply and demand imbalanced and inventory high, the driver IC price drop is expected to expand to 8~10% in 3Q22, and prices falling all the way until the end of the year cannot be ruled out.
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.
