News

At the end of 2021, 57% of the industry’s total monthly wafer capacity was owned by the top five companies. One year earlier the share was 56% and back in 2018 it was 53%. A decade ago, the share held by the top five was about 40%. The industry continues to get more top heavy regarding the composition of companies fabricating ICs. This analysis comes from Knometa’s recently released Global Wafer Capacity 2022 report.

With fab construction activity at its highest level in many years, it is not surprising that there has been talk of a market crash coming from too much capacity being added. The new Global Wafer Capacity 2022 report makes the case that, while fab expansion plans are certainly aggressive and could lead to some downward pricing pressure in 2024, a significant market downturn caused by too many fabs sitting with idle capacity is not expected.

At the end of 2021, there were 153 semiconductor fabs processing 300mm wafers for the fabrication of ICs, including CMOS image sensors, and non-IC products such as power discretes.

The 300mm wafer fab count increased by 14 in 2021, the most in one year since the same number opened in 2005. There are 10 fabs scheduled to open in 2022, followed by another 13 in 2023 and 10 in 2024. This puts the industry on pace to have more than 200 300mm fab lines in operation by 2026.

Intel announced plans to acquire Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion as part of efforts to become a major provider of foundry services and capacity. Intel describes the deal as highly complementary, bringing together its leading-edge nodes and scale manufacturing with Tower’s specialty technologies and customer-first approach to delivering technology and manufacturing capabilities.

Based on data compiled for Knometa’s new Global Wafer Capacity 2022 report, Tower was industry’s ninth largest foundry at the end of 2021 in terms of installed capacity. Tower has four wholly owned and three majority owned fab sites around the world. Tower also has a partnership with STMicroelectronics to share the cleanroom space in a new 300mm fab ST is opening later this year in Italy.

Tower's wholly owned fabs