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Samsung, TSMC Remain Tops in Available Wafer Fab Capacity
GlobalFoundries, TSMC, SK Hynix show greatest gains in wafer
capacity in 2015.
IC Insights has released its Global Wafer Capacity 2016-2020 report
that provides in-depth detail and analysis of IC industry capacity by wafer
size, by process geometry, by region, and by product type. The new report provides a ranking of the
industry’s 25 largest IC manufacturers in terms of installed capacity as of
December 2015. The top 10 capacity
leaders are shown in Figure 1. Among the
world’s top 10 capacity leaders in 2015 were four companies headquartered in
North America, two companies based in South Korea and in Taiwan, and one
company each from Europe and Japan. The
list includes the world’s four largest memory suppliers, three largest
foundries, the largest microprocessor supplier, and Texas Instruments and
ST—the two biggest suppliers of analog ICs.
Figure 1
 |
| Wafer Capacity Leaders Dec 2015 |
Collectively, the top 10 leaders had installed capacity of 11,737K
wafers/month at the end of the year, which equates to 72% of global capacity
and up slightly from 10,885K wafers/month or 71% in 2014.
• As of December 2015, Samsung had the most installed wafer
capacity with 2.5 million 200mm-equivalent wafers per month, which represented
15.5% of the world’s total capacity with most of it used for the fabrication of
DRAM and flash memory devices.
• Second in line was the largest pure-play foundry in the world
TSMC with about 1.9 million wafers per month capacity, or 11.6% of total
worldwide capacity.
• Micron substantially increased its available capacity in recent
years primarily through acquiring existing capacity from others. With the addition of the Elpida and Rexchip
fabs as well as the extra Inotera capacity, Micron first became the
third-largest wafer capacity holder in the world in 2013. Micron had the sixth-largest amount of wafer
capacity in 2012, and in the beginning of that year the company acquired
Intel’s stake in two IM Flash Technologies fabs, giving Micron access to all
the capacity from those fabs.
• The fourth-largest capacity holder at the end of 2015 was Toshiba
with about 1.3 million in monthly wafer capacity (8.2% of total worldwide
capacity), including a substantial amount of flash memory capacity for
joint-investor/partner SanDisk.
• Rounding out the top 5 companies was another memory IC supplier
SK Hynix with 1.3 million wafers/month (8.1% of total worldwide capacity).
• Intel’s capacity declined slightly in 2015 because of the
company’s Fab 68 in China being taken off-line while it is converted from the
production of logic chipsets to next-generation flash memory (3D NAND and
XPoint).
Given the skyrocketing cost of new wafer fabs and manufacturing
equipment and as more IC companies transition to a fab-lite or fabless business
model, IC Insights expects that an even greater percentage of fab capacity will
be in the hands of fewer suppliers through the end of the decade.
Report Details: Global WaferCapacity 2016-2020
