IC Insights, Scottsdale, Ariz., recently released its “Global Wafer Capacity 2020-2024” report that features detailed profiles of the five companies with the greatest fab capacity, and includes a ranking of the 25 largest wafer-capacity leaders in terms of monthly installed capacity. It provides in-depth detail, analyses, and forecasts for IC industry capacity by wafer size, process geometry, region, and product type.
The top five each had capacity of more than 1,000,000 wafer starts per month. Combined capacity of the top five represented 53% of total global wafer capacity at the end of 2019. In contrast, the top five capacity leaders in 2009 held 36% of worldwide capacity. Other semiconductor leaders included Intel (817K wafers/month), UMC (753K wafers/month), GlobalFoundries, Texas Instruments, and STMicro.
As of December 2019, Samsung had the most installed wafer capacity with 2.9 million 200mm-equivalent wafers per month. Second was TSMC, the largest pure-play foundry in the world, with about 2.5 million wafers per month capacity, or 12.8% of total worldwide capacity. Micron had the third largest amount of capacity at the end of 2019 with a little more than 1.8 million wafers, or 9.4% of worldwide capacity.
The fourth largest capacity holder at the end of 2019 was SK Hynix with a monthly wafer capacity of nearly 1.8 million wafers (8.9% of total worldwide capacity). Rounding out the top 5 companies was memory IC supplier Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory) with 1.4 million wafers/month (7.2% of total worldwide capacity), including a substantial amount of NAND flash memory capacity for its fab investment and technology development partner Western Digital.
