The semiconductor market has been in inventory adjustment since the second quarter of last year and after three quarters of adjustment period, inventory gradually returned to the seasonal average in the fourth quarter of last year. Although there is still a period of adjustment in overall mobile phone handset market this year, Season is expected to enter the recovery track.
The main reasons for the semiconductor industry to recover include:
1. This year's semiconductor stocks relative to last year's health, with the Apple iPhone prices are high, affecting the buying gas, non-brewing machine brewing grab market share.
2.iPhone shipping momentum slowed in the first quarter, so that the original tight memory, spare parts soothing, help non-Apple phone shipments.
3. The four major application areas include the new smart phone features, high-speed computing, Internet of Things and automotive electronics is expected to lead the growth.
The four major application areas will be the focus of the future growth of the electronics industry.Although the growth rate of smartphones narrowed to single digits, the features of the handsets continued to increase, including applications such as 3D sensing, AI, AR / VR and 5G , Will drive the mobile phone in the semiconductor content increase.
With the deep development of data center, the demand of GPU, CPU, FPGAs and ASICs will be driven by AI chips that will infiltrate smartphones, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), blockchain, etc. In addition to driving high-end process growth, HPC also drives the rapid growth of high-end packaging such as CoWoS on the substrate.
Car networking, smart grid, smart home, smart city, etc. It is expected that the development of IoT will drive the demand of chips such as WiFi, Bluetooth, 5G, sensing etc. In terms of vehicles, autonomous driving, ADAS and electric vehicles drive the growth of automotive semiconductors, Related requirements include image sensors, automotive diodes, metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs) and other specialized chips.
With the car, AI and HPC drive the growth of foundry industry.For foundry, in the new features of smart phones continue to improve, and HPC rapid development, high-end processes below 7 nm is expected to maintain the growth trend; and 8-inch Fabs are benefiting from autonomous driving, electric vehicle development, automotive semiconductor growth accelerated last year, coupled with the international manufacturers continue to expand outsourcing scale, expected this year, the global 8-inch wafer fab capacity rates remain high.