(source: Mobile daily online)Chip foundry giant TSMC confirmed that its 8-inch wafer foundry production line has loose production capacity. Although TSMC did not explain the reasons for the loosening of relevant production capacity, the legal person speculated that it should be related to the weak sales of smart phones, the off-season of consumer electronic products, and the weakening of the high-resolution TV boom. Among them, the orders for fingerprint identification, panel driven IC and some computer management chips of smart phones began to decline.However, TSMC immediately clarified that although the capacity of TSMC and its world advanced 8-inch wafer foundry production line is not full, it is also good. The industry believes that the term "TSMC" means that the 8 inch wafer foundry capacity is loose in the current generation, mainly in Chinese mainland foundries instead of TSMC and the world's advanced plants.
The tight production capacity of 8-inch wafer factory has lasted for four years. According to the information learned by Li Xing's industry, the main reason is that smartphone manufacturers began to promote capacitive fingerprint identification function four years ago, and launched multi lens upgrade on mobile phone cameras to add dual camera enhancement function, resulting in limited production expansion of 8-inch silicon wafer factory and 8-inch chip foundry, The growth rate of demand exceeded the speed of industrial capacity expansion.8-inch silicon wafers are mainly used for power management chips, panel drive chips, microcontrollers, metal oxide half effect transistors (MOSFETs), fingerprint identification chips and other products, with a wide range of applications. At the same time, before some newly designed chips are finalized, the low-cost 8-inch chip foundry will generally be selected to stream the chips; In addition, some vertical industry chips or special chips with orders less than the economic scale will also choose 8-inch chip foundry with lower cost and more guaranteed process because the order scale is small.Due to the tight production capacity of 8-inch wafers, which lasted for four years, in order to compete for the order arrangement capacity, some orders were placed repeatedly in various wafer factories from time to time, resulting in the difficulty of accurately predicting the industry demand. Therefore, in the first half of the year, both the silicon wafer factory and the Crystal Park foundry still said that the order arrangement of 8-inch wafer products has been arranged for two years, and the industry boom will continue for two to four years.
In fact, due to the shortage of capacity in the 8-inch wafer factory, display driver chips and touch driver chips with fierce competition and low unit price over the years have been relatively seriously resisted by the wafer factory since last year. Only in order to strive for more capacity, the industry has made great efforts to launch new tddi IC with integrated touch display to remove some capacity, The supply of tddi touch display chips is still relatively tight, and the price has remained high until September this year.The biggest reason for the shortage of 8-inch wafers in the early stage is that smart phones promote the popularization of capacitive fingerprint identification. In order to make fingerprint identification faster and more accurate, the area of the chip can not be too small, so the fingerprint identification chip is very expensive. In addition, at that time, capacitive fingerprint identification faced a huge market of 100 million units, which also made the industry unable to follow up in production capacity.
As Apple's new iPhone models this year give up the front capacitance fingerprint recognition function and replace it with face ID 3D structured light face recognition technology; In addition, driven by the comprehensive screen display technology, the Android camp has almost completely abandoned the front capacitive fingerprint recognition function of the new model, either return to the post fingerprint recognition with lower cost, or replace it with face recognition technology similar to apple face ID, or adopt off-screen optical fingerprint recognition technology; Or in addition to the pre capacitive fingerprint identification, they are used to show that their technology is comprehensive (the technology is immature).
In other words, the smart phone industry has almost sentenced the pre capacitive fingerprint identification technology to death. This can also be seen from the actions of listed companies. It mainly processes the front capacitance fingerprint identification module for the Android camp, and has built the world's largest production capacity of oufeiguang. Some time ago, it disassembled and sold the front capacitance fingerprint identification production line.Some people will say that there are orders for off-screen optical fingerprint identification chips from wafer factories? Yes, but the information Li Xing learned from the industry shows that the area of the off-screen optical fingerprint identification chip can be smaller than that of the capacitive fingerprint identification chip because it can focus with a lens. In the same wafer area, the number of off-screen optical fingerprint chips is much more than that of the capacitive fingerprint identification chip.
Bao’an District Shenzhen City, China
+86 189 3806 5764