Press Releases and News

Increased chip demand is being driven by better-than-expected orders for all types of electronics, from next generation smartphones to electric vehicles. Memory and certain logic chips are in tight supply. In a few semiconductor product groups, unit sales are significantly up with ASPs declining, signaling some inventory build-up. At the same time, semiconductor manufacturers are making production adjustments in order to return to previous output levels. However, some OEMs are also double ordering certain products which makes the situation appear worse than it really is.

There are challenges on the semiconductor supply side that will place some restraints on semiconductor sales in 2021. As electric vehicles and AI continue to penetrate the general consumer market, there are reports of chip shortages. Current semiconductor manufacturing capacity is finding it challenging to keep up with demand. A new report from Semico Research, Semico Wafer Demand Q1 2021 Highlights (MA110-21), forecasts wafer demand for 2021 to increase 8.2% in 2021.

There is a significant amount of economic uncertainty due to the COVID‑19 pandemic; however, Semico’s outlook for semiconductor sales includes several areas of growth which have positively impacted the updated forecast. A new report from Semico Research, Semico Wafer Demand Q4 2020 Highlights (MA112-20), forecasts wafer demand to grow by 3.1% this year over 2019.

The semiconductor industry today is faced with several substantial issues—the continuing rise in design costs for complex SoCs, the decrease in the incidence of first-time-right designs and the increase in the design cycle time against shrinking market windows and decreasing product life cycles. An additional factor has now been added to SoC design costs with the emergence of complicated software applications intended to run on the SoC silicon. As happens often in our industry, the right solution surfaces at the right time.