David Wong, an analyst at Wells Fargo, said that the semiconductor industry started to recover from the second half of 2016. This trend is expected to continue until next year, but growth may slow down in 2018. He pointed out that in recent years the growth of the semiconductor industry Are below the standard, and the pent-up demand burst in 2016, prompting the recovery growth of the semiconductor market. The global GDP growth rate in 2017 and 2018 will remain in the range of 3.4-3.5%. The data show that in 2012 to 2016 There has been a considerable amount of pent-up demand in the semiconductor end-markets created in the year, which propelled the semiconductor recovery in 2017 and 2018, possibly up to 2019.
In terms of memory, memory sales are expected to grow by almost 60% in 2017 and continue to expand in 2018, though the rate of increase will slow sharply and the growth rate is expected to reach 40% at the beginning of 2018 and to less than 10% by the end of 2009. For example, DRAM and NAND Market, although market growth will be slower and slower, the current DRAM price hikes and the move to '3-D' NAND will benefit memory makers such as Micron. In general, the continued growth of the storage market will affect memory chips Manufacturers and semiconductor equipment manufacturers have a positive impact, but also note that there is a risk of a hard-braking risk for high levels of growth in storage in 2017.
According to the supply chain, DRAM will continue to be out of stock in the first half of next year. Although the industry intends to increase its production capacity, the new capacity will fall into late next year and early next year. Therefore, DRAM supply growth in the first half of 2018 will only depend on 1x Nano upgrade, the overall demand is still in short supply, the price continued to be bullish, South Asia Branch, Winbond, A-DATA will continue to benefit.NAND Flash and NOR Flash out of stock in the first half of next year you can get relief.Supply including Samsung, Toshiba, SK Hynix, Micron and other second-half to speed up the 3D NAND production capacity and technology conversion, yield has continued to improve, next year after the production capacity can be sufficient supply. NOR Flash also due to mainland China Yangtze River Storage and SMIC out, plus Power crystal into OEM market, production capacity increased in the first half of next year, the demand side into the traditional off-season, the market conditions are expected to tend to supply and demand balance.
David Wong believes that driverless cars are another highlight of the semiconductor industry. He is especially optimistic about Intel's development in this area. He believes that the acquisition of Mobileye Intel leads the field of driverless car chips through the acquisition of Mobileye.
In March 2017, Intel announced a $ 15 billion acquisition of Mobileye, an Israeli information technology company, which won an important bar for autopilot technology and laid the foundations for a future one-third of the autonomous driving world for Intel, Qualcomm and Nvidia. The EyeQ4 driverless chip with its 7nm FinFET process will go on sale next year, the EyeQx chip from Mobileye, and the EyeQ5 chipset in 2020. EyeQ5's main rival is the NVIDIA Xaiver or Drive PX2 platform.
Electronics account for over 80% of today's automotive innovations. As automotive automation continues to grow, semiconductor components such as Maxim, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, and others, will also grow from autonomous vehicles and the overall automotive market Benefit.
In addition, he is optimistic about the server chip, especially in machine learning related areas. He said: 'We think the data center is the key to some important new growth areas in the future, including artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, Internet of Things and 5G communications.' In this regard, AMD's new chip Epyc in 2018 will be dazzling performance.
AMD has been the No. 2 supplier of x86 processors in the past in the server space, however, many years ago, AMD's server products lagged behind Intel's performance and the share of server processors has dropped to negligible levels. Mid-year, AMD introduced a new server processor, the EPYC series, which appears to have very competitive performance characteristics. Wells Fargo considers EPYC to provide AMD with the ability to re-compete with x86 server processors, so AMD Will start to gain some market share in the server processor market. Shipments will rise from less than 1% market share in 2017 to 5% by the end of 2018, 10% by the end of 2019, and revenue will grow to 3% by the end of 2018 % Market share and 6% by the end of 2019.
In this regard, Jibbon Semiconductor Research Center data show that the data center server demand will become the key to the overall server market shipping growth is expected worldwide server shipments in 2018 will grow by 5.53%, Intel and AMD new server platform conversion Will fuel the growth of the market.
For Nvidia, he believes the company will face a sharp slowdown in 2018, a significant slowdown in growth relative to the highs of the past two years.