As a supplier of wafer cleaning and other relevant technologies, the Californian company ACM Research (Association for Computing Machinery) is a careful and diligent observer of the chip market.
Billions to be invested in “fabs”
Since the beginning of 2020, when the chip market has begun to explode, ACM has registered that almost all chip manufacturers are responding with huge investments in R&D activities and in new facilities. Market leader Intel intends to invest a total of $50 billion in the U.S. and another $17 billion in Ireland and Israel by 2024. Currently, Samsung seeks for a development and production site in the U.S. for raising a $17 billion fabrication facility (a so-called “fab”) for 10 nm chips (tracks have a width of 10 nanometers). The Taiwanese contract manufacturer (“foundry”) TSMC is planning global investments of $100 billion by 2024, and the South Korean storage giant SK Hynix is considering a giant $106 billion fab in North Korea. Smaller manufacturers want to expand their production capacities as well. “GlobalFoundries”, for example, operating fabs in New York, Malta, and Germany, is doubling its investments to $1.4 billion.
Wafer market develops not as expected
Wafers with a diameter of 300 mm have been produced since the late 1990s, and R&D departments were working on 450mm wafers already. At that time, market analysts announced the quick end of mature 200mm technology. However, up to now most chips sold are manufactured on 200mm wafers. In addition to 38 new 300mm fabs worldwide by 2024, there are some new 200mm fabs in the pipeline. This surprising development is limited where suppliers like ACM can no longer fully serve the 200mm market, because they had focused on larger wafers and smaller chip structures.
The ACM report on current developments in supply chains for chip manufacturing is found here: https://www.acmrcsh.com/2021/04/semiconductor-supply-chain-ready-for-long-term-growth/
The world’s major chip manufacturers
The top 10 chip manufacturers by revenue in 2020:
| Rank | Manufacturer | Revenue [$ Billion] | Compared to 2019 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Intel | 73.8 | +4 % |
| 2 | Samsung | 60.4 | +9 % |
| 3 | TSMC | 45.4 | +31 % |
| 4 | SK Hynix | 26.5 | +14 % |
| 5 | Micron | 21.7 | +3 % |
| 6 | Qualcomm | 19.4 | +35 % |
| 7 | Broadcom | 17.0 | +1 % |
| 8 | NVIDIA | 15.8 | +50 % |
| 9 | Texas Instruments | 13.0 | -4 % |
| 10 | Infineon | 11.0 | -0.1 % |
Reference: https://www.finanzen.net/top_ranking/top_ranking_detail.asp?inRanking=8&inPos=11 (German)
Chip shortage until 2022?
Billions of invests, prospected through 2024, will not help alleviate today's chip shortage. Nevertheless, Samuel Moore of IEEE-Spectrum, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers magazine, predicts an easing of the chip market: not for this year, but after all for the course of 2022 (reference: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/devices/how-and-when-the-chip-shortage-will-end-in-4-charts) ... although Moore claims to have observed that chip buyers are currently stockpiling one chip (on average) for each chip they actually need.