The year 021 is about to pass. If you want to choose a key word for the semiconductor industry this year, it must be a lack of cores. Increasing demand has allowed the capacity utilization rates of major 8-inch and 12-inch wafer foundries to approach 100%. In order to alleviate the chip shortage in 2021, many fabs have announced expansion plans. It is expected that there will be 12 new foundries worldwide in 2022. Among the most concerned, TSMC will add three fabs in Taiwan, Japan, and the United States; Samsung will add two fabs in South Korea and the United States; SMIC will add three new fabs in the mainland.
Under this background, when the lack of core can be solved has become a problem that everyone is concerned about.
When will the lack of cores be resolved, and what do all parties say?
The prediction of the out-of-stock by the chip designer continues until the second half of 2022. In September of this year, AMD CEO Su Zifeng said that global chips will gradually ease in the second half of 2022, but the first half of the year may still be tight. And Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said in October that the supply chain can gradually get rid of the crisis of core shortage in early 2022. Digitimes also predicts that Apple’s shipment restrictions due to lack of cores will be eased in February 2022.
The predictions given by chip manufacturers are relatively conservative. GF Semiconductor said that GF’s production capacity before 2023 has been booked out; Intel also believes that the chip supply problem will not improve until 2023; TSMC also said that its production capacity is tight. The stretch will last until next year. The conservative predictions of chip manufacturers are mostly due to the unpredictability of demand. As Zhang Zhongmou said, the root cause of the current round of core shortage is that the demand side underestimated the demand for chips, not the production capacity of the manufacturer.