NAND flash pices may stablize in 2022, but supply is likely to turn tight in the second half of next year, according to Silicon Motion's president. Meanwhile, Chinese memory maker YMTC is ready to volume produce 128-layer QLC NAND flash, initially targeting consumer SSDs. And in a recent interview by DIGITIMES, Harish Krishnaswamy, CTO and co-founder of MixComm, and Marzieh Veyseh, CTO/CPO and co-founder of SiTune, talked about their views on the development of mmWave market, latest chip crunch, and the Satcom market opportunities.
NAND flash prices are expected to stay stable in 2022, but the supply of such chips is likely to turn tight in the second half of next year, according to Wallace Kou, president of Taiwan-based NAND controller vendor Silicon Motion Technology.
China-based Yangtz Memory Technologies (YMTC) has shipped over 300 million 64-layer 3D NAND flash memory chips and is ready to volume produce 128-layer QLC (quad-level cell) NAND, according to the company's chief operating officer Cheng Weihua.
Since the 1970s, Taiwan and South Korea have been parallelly developing semiconductor and new-geneation IT industries. The national conditions and industrial strength of the two countries are very similar. During the Cold War, Taiwan and South Korea were part of the first island chain facing the communist world. Now the US and China are rivals that compete head to head with not only weaponry, but also the strength of the technology industry, the most representative of which is the semiconductor industry and the ubiquitous supply chain. About 60% of Taiwan's and Korea's semiconductor exports go to China. In 2020, China imported as much as US$350 billion of semiconductors, with about half of them from Taiwan and South Korea. Taiwan and South Korea both export enormously to China on the one hand, and vie for the industry leadership position on the other. South Korea specializes in memory, but Taiwan's industry structure is more diverse: wafer foundry, IC design, packaging and testing. Taiwan and South Korea dislike each other but also rely on each other.
Deep Vision, a startup developing AI edge accelerator hardware, has recently closed a US$35 million Series B financing round, with Silicon Motion Technology being among the investors.
In a recent interview by DIGITIMES Etron chairman Nicky Lu explains why monolithic/heterogeneous integration is important to the future of the semiconductor industry. Meanwhile Apple has increased the storage capacity of its new iPhone 13 series to up to 1TB, and memory makers believe this will prompt other smartphone brands to follow suit and equip their flagship devices with the same internal storage capacity. Backend service providers believe Apple's new iPad mini 6 will generate strong orders for 5G RF modules.
With Apple's new iPhones featuring one terabyte of storage, other brands are expected to follow suit by launching more flagship smartphones featuring at least 1TB of internal storage, according to sources at memory makers.
While global chip shortages can hardly ease in the short term and prices continue to rise further, regional semiconductor fleets are quietly taking shape as the US, EU, South Korea, Japan and China are all moving to enhance localized chip production, strengthen foundry capability and capacity, build sound ecosystems, or pursue semiconductor self-sufficiency, according to Nicky Lu, chairman of Etron Technology, a Taiwan-based vendor of specialty buffer memory products.
Powered by digital transformation and other secular technology trends, global semiconductor equipment investments for front end fabs in 2022 are expected to reach nearly US$100 billion to meet soaring demand for electronics after topping a projected US$90 billion this year, both new records, according to SEMI.
Memory module houses are gearing up for the upcoming rollouts of new-generation PC products supporting DDR5 memory, while slowing down their purchases of DDR4 chips, according to industry sources.
TSMC is forecast to see its revenue in the second half of this year grow 14% from the level in the first half, with revenue for all of 2021 set to represent a 24% on-year surge, according to IC Insights.
Kioxia has announced it is sampling its FL6 Series enterprise NVMe SCM SSDs. Featuring Kioxia's SCM solution, XL-FLASH, the dual-port and PCIe 4.0-compliant FL6 Series SSDs bridge the gap between DRAM and TLC-based drives. This makes them well-suited to latency-sensitive use cases such as caching layer, tiering and write logging.
Industrial memory demand picked up in the second quarter, but has started slowing down during the latter half of the third quarter due to seasonal factors, according to industry sources.
China's Big Fund is stepping up investments in the country's memory sector in line with its push for IC self-sufficiency. Meanwhile, the world's major memory chipmakers are ramping up their QLC NAND chip output, eyeing robuts demand from both the PC and server segments. And IDMs, Foxconn and BYD are gearing up deployments in third-generation semiconductors, eyeing EV applications.
Major NAND flash chip suppliers are poised to ramp up their output for QLC (quad-level cell) NAND chips between the end of this year and 2022, eyeing robust demand for not only PCs but also datacenter applications, according to industry sources.
More China-based memory makers will receive cash injections from the government, as China's National IC Industry Investment Fund (Big Fund) steps up its investment in the country's homegrown memory sector, according to industry sources.
Memory price growth is poised to lose momentum in the fourth quarter of 2021, as chip suppliers, and downstream distributors and module houses see their deliveries disrupted by the ongoing shortages of controller chips and other ICs, according to Team Group.
Specialty DRAM IC design specialist Elite Semiconductor Memory Technology (ESMT) remains upbeat about its shipment prospects for the rest of this year, thanks to its diversified client portfolio and target markets.
Global semiconductor equipment billings increased 48% on year and 5% sequentially to a record high of US$24.9 billion in the second quarter of 2021, according to SEMI.
As order visibility for many market segment, such as 5G and EV, has already extended to 2025, foundry houses are eager to expand fab capacity for both advanced and mature manufacturing processes. IDMs are migrating production of third-gen semiconductors to 8-inch fabs amid growing demand. Commodity DRAM may be seeing a slowdown in demand, but demand for the server and datacenter applications has been stable.
South Korea's top-2 memory makers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are optimistic about their business performances for the second half of 2021 thanks to strong memory demand for mobile devices and servers, according to Digitimes Research.
Demand for server and datacenter applications has been stable and may help sustain DRAM price growth in the fourth quarter of this year, according to industry sources.
Pure-play foundry Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing (PSMC) plans to initiate a further price hike of about 10% mainly for its logic IC process manufacturing, with the new pricing to be effective starting the fourth quarter, according to industry sources.
Specializing in 8-inch wafer foundry fabrication services for analog and mixed-signal ICs, SK Hynix System IC has disclosed net profits climbed 42.7% on year to KRW76.1 billion (US$65.8 million) in the first half of 2021, despite a 0.5% dip in revenue during the same period.
