The global shortage of semiconductors did not suddenly appear after Huawei, which was sanctioned by the United States, made a massive rush to buy them. Currently, the global electronic products due to infectious diseases best-selling, the second half of the major semiconductor factory fires in Japan, Southeast Asia, factory closures due to infectious diseases, the French factory strike after strike and other reasons, exacerbated the global semiconductor shortage. U.S. science and technology website Extremetech 21, said the article "chip shortage" is one of the key producers of chip raw material products lack of 200 mm wafer investment. In the past few decades, manufacturers launched a one-time larger wafer size, because the larger wafer size reduces the waste of materials, increasing the factory's daily production of chip yield. Originally, 200mm wafers were thought to disappear as 300mm wafers came online, but that trend didn't end up happening, and customers still prefer to produce on 200mm wafer lines, a production technology that has become very mature and less expensive.
Many IoT and 5G chips are etched on 200mm wafers, and as demand for those products has increased this year, 200mm wafer production capacity has been hard to book. Large foundries such as TSMC have been slow to expand new 200-millimeter capacity. Prior to the outbreak of the new Crown pneumonia epidemic, many foundries were already utilizing a high percentage of their 200mm production capacity. After the outbreak, additional demand for a variety of chips further increased pressure on the near-saturated supply chain. The part of the process that affects automobiles, cameras, and many other industries in maturing can be taken literally by everyone. Maturity means that the process is essentially a more mature field, so expansion has always been slow in the past. Coupled with the fact that many equipment companies simply do not provide equipment for the maturation process, so the maturation process of a wafer alternatives in the past expansion is basically very slow, in the whole supply side of the process to become advanced maturity, facing a number of bottlenecks.
Suspension and pause in the demand for Wawper foundry, resulting in the entire Wawper foundry order allocation has also undergone some changes. Especially in the automotive semiconductor part, last year the automotive sales showed negative growth in the world, so the whole order is delayed. Because the whole contagion will slowly recover this year. However, Wawper foundry order war process takes 3~6 months, so the whole automotive chip foundry demand can not be met in the short term.
Because the revision of the hospital big project just mentioned the supply side of the increase in production, it also has certain limitations of flexibility, we think the chip shortage in the whole of this year in a short period of time can not be eliminated.