Mergers Impact on Wafer Fab Capacity

IC Insights published it Global Wafer Capacity from December 2015 (see below). However, this ranking table is really a frozen picture of the past. With the recent merger activity of semiconductor companies, China spending money on buying semiconductor companies, recent trouble of Toshiba, Western Digital to buy SanDisk in $19 billion deal will change the ranking of the table quite a bit in 2016.


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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

Thinner Wafers Improve Power IC

Infineon ships power ICs from floppy 300-mm wafers

http://www.eetimes.com/design/power-management-design/4407170/Infineon-ships-power-ICs-from-floppy-300-mm-wafers


LONDON –Infineon Technologies AG has claimed it is the first and only company worldwide to produce power semiconductors on 300-millimeter thin wafers and that this will bring the company both a technical and cost advantage over its competition. Infineon (Munich, Germany) has been working on the technology for several years and in February 2013 received first customer clearances to ship CoolMOS family products made on a 300-mm production line at Villach, Austria, which uses thin wafers. The chips are now being shipped worldwide, Infineon said. As power flows vertically in a power MOSFET the reduced thickness lowers resistance and losses and allows heat to be removed more effectively. Infineon has worked with thinned wafers or thin epitaxial structures on top of wafers for more than a decade. However, transferring such a process to 300-mm wafers sets additional challenges. Infineon did not indicate what power ICs are the first to ship from 300-mm wafers but is reported to have been working on power MOSFETs and insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs). A wafer is typically 350-microns thick prior to being diced into individual chips. At the 200-mm wafer size Infineon typically thins power wafers back to 60-micron and even 40-micron thicknesses. The technology is used for IGBTs) and high-and low-power MOSFETs for a range of applications from automotive engine control through to power packs and induction hobs. The larger size of 300-mm wafer compared to 200-mm wafers used as standard for power IC production means two-and-a-half times as many chips can be made from each one providing a cost advantage to Infineon. "Infineon put its faith in this manufacturing technology very early on and continued to invest even in economically difficult times," said Reinhard Ploss, CEO of Infineon, in a statement. "The qualification of our entire 300-millimeter line represents a veritable leap ahead of the competition," he added. Infineon plans to add the approval of its back-end packaging site in Malacca, Malaysia and then to expand production to its front-end site in Dresden, Germany, where a fully automated 300-mm production line will focus on high volume production. The technology transfer to Dresden is running on schedule and qualification of the first CoolMOS products will be completed in March 2013, Infineon said. Meanwhile Villach will work on transferring more power semiconductor technologies to 300-mm production.