By Lara Chamness, Industry Research and Statistics, SEMI
North America has a long and rich history of semiconductor manufacturing and innovation. As home to device manufacturers such as Intel, Texas Instruments, Micron, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, NXP (Freescale), Fairchild, Avago, Qorvo, Microchip, ON Semiconductor, significant operations of Samsung, and leading fabless companies such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, NVIDIA, AMD, Apple, Marvell, and Xilinx, North America continues to play an important role in advanced semiconductor manufacturing and in device and system design. SEMI’s Fab Forecast shows that North America accounts for 14 percent of Worldwide Installed Fab capacity (excluding discretes).
Source: SEMI (www.semi.org)
In terms of revenues, IC Insights recently announced, that companies headquartered in the United States continue to capture the bulk of IDM and Fabless IC Sales.
- U.S. companies account for 51 percent of IDM Companies IC Sales in 2015
- U.S. companies account for 62 percent of Fabless Companies IC Sales in 2015
Due to the presence of leading device manufacturers, North America represents a significant portion of the new equipment market, annual spending on average over the past five years has been in excess of $7 billion. Spending for new equipment is expected to be approach $6 billion this year.
Source: SEMI/SEAJ; Forecast, SEMI (www.semi.org)
With such a large installed fab base, North America also claims a significant portion of the wafer fab materials market. Comparing global fab capacity to global wafer fab market share, North America represents 18 percent of the Wafer Fab Materials market compared to 14 percent of global fab capacity. This is due to the advanced device manufacturing that occurs in the region, which requires more process steps and advanced materials which fetch higher average selling prices.
Regional Wafer Fab Materials Markets
Source: SEMI (www.semi.org)
The equipment market is expected to increase about 10 percent in North America this year due to sizable investments by GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Intel and Samsung, while the Wafer Fab Materials Market is expected to remain flat this year relative to last year. As companies like Apple, Intel, Qualcomm continue to innovate, North America will remain an essential force in both device and systems design and in semiconductor manufacturing.
Plan to attend the SEMI/Gartner Market Symposium at SEMICON West 2016 on Monday, July 11, for an update on the semiconductor market outlook.