Semicon Taiwan 2013 consisted of several programs of interest to the IC packaging community. Taking a look at the Market Trends Forum chaired by Dr Burn Lin of TSMC.

DRAM Status – Charlie Chan –  Morgan Stanley

During their discussions on the financial status of the DRAM industry, Morgan Stanley showed a great slide depicting consolidation in the DRAM memory business over the last decade.

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Even though memory content still favors desktop/PC over tablet/smart phone the cross over point for mobile applications appears to be within the next month.

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Smartphones – Guadois – UBS

Nicolas Gaudois Managing Director of UBS Investment Research looked at the “ The End of the High End Smartphones Run.”

UBS projects smartphones to be a maturing market with smartphone sales now > 50% of the US market. They estimate US mid to high end smartphones (> $300)  YoY unit growth of 15% in ’13E, 8% in ’14E and 5% in ’15E .

Smartphones have been the main growth engine for the semis industry out of the financial crisis. Communications accounted for 57% of TSMC revenues in 2Q13 and 51% for UMC. UBS assumes single-digit YoY revenue growth for the cellular phones industry implies similar levels for wireless semis. “This implies a longer term slowdown in semiconductor revenues growth – until more application drivers emerge.”

UBS expects to see late 2014 14nm finFET production at Intel, TSMC and Samsung.

UBS sees DRAM usage split equally between PC and mobile markets and the NAND flash demand split between mobile phones and solid state drives.

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SEMI Packaging Materials Outlook – Dan Tracy – SEMI

The SEMI Packaging Materials forecast is shown below.

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1. Includes PBGA, PPGA, LGA, and CSP laminate substrates and flex BGA and CSP substrates; 3. Includes die attach film (tape) materials; 4. Includes solder balls and wafer level package dielectrics

The Pacific region accounting for ~ 95% of the total market!

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