Global semiconductor production area capacity trends
Recently, in view of the abnormal demand for semiconductors, ESIA is studying trends related to the production capacity of global semiconductor production areas. The percentage comes from monthly wafer start-ups, and production capacity is normalized to 200mm wafer equivalent.
Data standardized the monthly production capacity of wafers to 8-inch wafers. The chart shows that the share of all semiconductor production areas except for mainland China has declined in the five years from 2015 to 2020.
Among them, mainland China has increased from 14.4% of global production in 1995 to 22.8% in 2020.
In the same period, Europe dropped from 9.4% to 7.2%, and the United States dropped from 12.6% five years ago to 10.6% in 2020.
The second place is Taiwan, China, but it has dropped slightly from 18.8% in 2015 to 17.8% in 2020.
South Korea ranks third with 15.3%. In 2015, this figure was 18.4%. In addition, Singapore’s wafer production capacity accounted for 4.7%.
The five largest fab production capacity accounts for more than half of the global market
IC Insights released a new global wafer production capacity 2021-2025 report in February this year. The top five wafer capacity leaders, Samsung, TSMC, Micron, SK Hynix, and Kioxia have at least 1.5 million wafers processed per month.
After entering the top five, the wafer capacity of other semiconductor leaders dropped rapidly. Intel (884K wafers/month), UMC (772K wafers/month), Texas Instruments and SMIC rank in the top 10.
In December 2020, the total production capacity of the top five companies of Samsung, TSMC, Micron, SK Hynix, and Kioxia accounted for 54% of the total global wafer production capacity, an increase of 1 percentage point from the 53% in 2019. In contrast, in 2009, the top 10 wafer capacity leaders accounted for 54% of the global total capacity, and the top five wafer capacity accounted for 36% of the global capacity.
Samsung has the largest installed wafer capacity, with 3.1 million 200mm equivalent wafers per month, which accounts for 14.7% of the world's total capacity.
The capacity growth in 2020 seems to be lower than expected, because the company's line 13 wafer fab is partially excluded from 2020 in 2020, because part of the factory will be converted from DRAM to CMOS image sensor production in 2020.