TrendForce said that the gradual weakness of the auto market since 2018, coupled with the severe impact of the epidemic in 2020, has made the stocking momentum of major module factories significantly insufficient. However, the global automotive market is recovering in 2021. It is estimated that vehicle sales will rebound from 77 million vehicles last year to 84 million. At the same time, under the development of automation, intelligence and electrification, the consumption of various semiconductor components will increase. However, due to the weak auto market demand, the stock volume of car manufacturers was low, and the phenomenon of long and short materials has seriously affected the utilization rate of car manufacturers and terminal vehicle shipments.

The recent shortage of goods in the IC supply chain has gradually spread from the consumer electronics and computer communications industry (Consumer & ICT) to the industrial control and automotive market (Industrial & Automotive). In the past, the automotive semiconductor market was mainly based on IDM or Fab-lite production, such as NXP (NXP), Infineon (Infineon), STMicro (STMicro), Renesas (Renesas), On Semiconductor, Broadcom (Broadcom), Texas Instruments (TI), etc. Since automotive ICs generally require high-temperature and high-pressure operating environments and a long product life cycle, they require high product reliability (Reliability) and long-term supply (Longevity) characteristics, so it is usually not easy to switch production lines And supply chain.

Global foundry capacity is fully loaded, and automotive semiconductors are lacking

However, in the case of insufficient global foundry production capacity, automotive semiconductors are significantly affected by capacity crowding, such as automotive MCU and CIS in the 12-inch plant; automotive MEMS, Discrete, PMIC and DDI in the 8-inch plant. TrendForce said that at present, the 12-inch fab at 28nm, 45nm and 65nm production lines are most in short supply for automotive semiconductors. At the same time, the 8-inch fab at nodes above 0.18um is also subject to production capacity.

With the high capital expenditure, R&D amortization and operating costs of self-operated fabs, IDM automotive semiconductor suppliers have also expanded their outsourcing foundry to TSMC, Globalfoundries, UMC, and Samsung in recent years. (Samsung), World Advanced (VIS), Win Semiconductor, etc. Among them, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) made it clear in the fourth quarter of 2020 that automotive semiconductors bottomed out in the third quarter of last year and began to chase orders in the fourth quarter, considering converting Logic production capacity to Specialty IC Foundry to support long-term cooperation. End customer.