IC Insights recently released its Global Wafer Capacity 2020-2024 report that provides in-depth analyses and forecasts of IC industry capacity by wafer size, by process geometry, by region, and by product type through 2024. Typically, the IC industry meets most of its IC unit demand by increasing wafer starts, not by dramatically increasing the number of dice per wafer. The number of good ICs shipped per wafer increased by an average of...

IC Insights is in the process of revising its forecast and analysis of the IC industry and will present its new findings in The McClean Report 2020, which will be released in January 2020. Among the revisions is a complete update of forecast growth rates of the 33 main product categories classified by the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics organisation (WSTS) through the year 2024. The top five categories for IC product growth are covered in th...

After a 16% drop in 2019, IC Insights believes that 2020 will see single-digit growth for the IC industry and a moderate increase in the worldwide economy, with China playing a critical role in these forecasts. In 2024, the IC market is forecast to reach $575bn, up from $356bn in 2019.

IC Insights’ ‘November Update to the 2019 McClean Report’, released later this month, will include a discussion of the forecasted top-25 semiconductor suppliers in 2019 (the top-15 2019 semiconductor suppliers are covered in this research bulletin). 

IC Insights' November Update to The McClean Report 2019 will include a capital spending forecast for the major semiconductor companies for 2019 and 2020. In January of next year, IC Insights will release The McClean Report 2020 and present its seminars that review the five-year forecasts for the IC industry.

The microprocessor market’s string of nine straight record-high annual sales between 2010 and 2018 is expected to end this year with worldwide MPU revenue dropping four percent to about $77.3bn because of weakness in smartphone shipments, excess inventories in data centre computers, and the global fallout from the US-China trade war, according to IC Insights. 

After slowing in the past couple years, semiconductor merger and acquisition activity strengthened in the first eight months of 2019 with the combined value of about 20 M&A agreement announcements reaching $28.0bn for the purchase of chip companies, business units, product lines, intellectual property (IP), and wafer fabs between January and the end of August. 

Despite an expected slowdown in growth this year and in 2020, the CMOS image sensor market is forecast to continue reaching record-high sales and unit volumes through 2023 with the spread of digital-imaging applications offsetting weakness in the global economy and the fallout from the US-China trade war. 

After reaching record-high sales in the last two years, the microcontroller (MCU) market slid lower in the first half of 2019 because of overall weakness in electronic systems, a slowdown in automobile sales, and no letup in the trade war between the US and China. In the first six months of this year, worldwide sales of microcontrollers declined about 13% compared to the first half of 2018 while MCU unit shipments fell 14%, according to IC Insigh...

IC Insights released its ‘August Update’ to the 2019 ‘McClean Report’ earlier this month. This Update included Part one of an in-depth analysis of the foundry industry, an updated forecast for semiconductor capital spending this year, and a ranking of the top-25 1H19 semiconductor suppliers and their 3Q19 sales outlook. The top-15 1H19 semiconductor suppliers are covered in this research bulletin.

In its soon to be released ‘Mid-Year Update to The McClean Report 2019’, IC Insights forecasts that the 2018-2023 global GDP and IC market correlation coefficient will reach 0.88 (0.94 when excluding memory), up from 0.87 in 2010 to 2018. IC Insights depicts the increasingly close correlation between worldwide GDP growth and IC market growth through 2018, as well as its forecast through 2023.

In the wake of tariffs and trade tension between China and the United States, government officials and company representatives throughout China have doubled down on their resolve to quickly and meaningfully grow the nation’s domestic IC business in order to reduce its dependence on critical IC components currently supplied by companies based in the U.S. and other countries.

Inventory corrections, slowing smartphone shipments, and pullbacks in purchase orders throttled sales growth in semiconductor sensors and actuators last year, resulting in a subpar six percent increase in 2018 to a record high $14.7bn after double-digit percentage gains in 2017 and 2016, according to IC Insights’ 2019 O-S-D Report - A Market Analysis and Forecast for Optoelectronics, Sensors/Actuators, and Discretes.

  Double digit percentage sales growth in power transistors strengthened last year, climbing 14% in 2018 to reach an all time high of $16.3bn after setting the previous record in 2017 with an 11% increase, according to IC Insights’ 2019 O-S-D Report - A Market Analysis and Forecast for Optoelectronics, Sensors/Actuators, and Discretes.

In the March Update to the 2019 edition of ‘The McClean Report—A Complete Analysis and Forecast of the Integrated Circuit Industry’, IC Insights shows how the total memory market heavily influenced total IC market growth for the positive during the past two years but will likely have a very negative impact on total IC market growth in 2019.

  IC Insights’ new 2019 O-S-D Report - A Market Analysis and Forecast for Optoelectronics, Sensors/Actuators, and Discretes was released at the end of March. Among the O-S-D industry data included in the new 350-page report is an analysis of the top-30 O-S-D suppliers (the top-10 ranking is discussed in this Research Bulletin).

IC Insights recently released its Global Wafer Capacity 2019-2023 report that provides in-depth analyses and forecasts of IC industry capacity by wafer size, by process geometry, by region, and by product type through 2023.

The IC industry has been on a mission to pare down older capacity (≤200mm wafers) in order to produce devices more cost-effectively on larger wafers. In its recently released Global Wafer Capacity 2019-2023 report, IC Insights shows that due to the surge of merger and acquisition activity in the middle of this decade and with more companies producing IC devices on sub-20nm process technology, suppliers are eliminating inefficient wafer fabs.&n...

The advancement of the IC industry hinges on the ability of IC manufacturers to continue offering more performance and functionality for the money. As mainstream CMOS processes reach their theoretical, practical, and economic limits, lowering the cost of ICs (on a per-function or per-performance basis) is more critical and challenging than ever. 

In a recently released report from, IC Insights, entitled: ‘Global Wafer Capacity 2019-2023’, the company provides in-depth detail, analyses, and forecasts for IC industry capacity by wafer size, process geometry, region, and product type through 2023. The graph below shows the worlds installed monthly wafer production capacity by geographic region (or country) as of December 2018.