Taiwanese MCU manufacturers reported another price increase in the third quarter

    Due to the lockdown of Malaysia due to the epidemic, although the semiconductor industry can still maintain the operation of six people, the MCU market is currently in a serious shortage of supply. With the production capacity of IDM‘s large sealing and testing plants being reduced, the MCU market will become even tighter in the second half of the year.

    Not only that, manufacturers such as Chinese Mainland foundry SMIC International and Huahong have reported that they will give priority to supply the capacity of Chinese Mainland IC design plants in the second half of the year, so they may be squeezed out to Taiwan MCU manufacturers.

    The supply chain pointed out that SMIC, Huahong and other foundries had notified Taiwan‘s IC design plants before the end of 2020. Taiwan‘s MCU manufacturers had already moved their production capacity back to Taiwan‘s foundries. However, the supply of MCU is bound to become more tight as the production capacity of Chinese Mainland‘s foundries is reduced.

    It is understood that among the global MCU manufacturers, in addition to the international IDM big factory MCU products as the customer‘s first choice, the next choice is the Taiwan MCU factory. The MCU manufacturers in Chinese Mainland have the capacity, but will still be the third choice of the terminal manufacturers. The legal person pointed out that, on the whole, the shortage of 8-inch capacity supply is still unchanged, and the supply of MCU in the second half of the year may be more out of stock.

    Due to a further shortage of MCU supply in the second half of the year, international IDM manufacturers notified customers as early as the middle of the second quarter that they were about to increase their prices again. Among Taiwan‘s MCU factories, one of the main suppliers, Shengqun, has also informed customers that they will increase their prices again in the third quarter. Other MCU factories are expected to follow this upward trend, and the legal representative estimates that the MCU market is expected to increase its double-digit level again in the third quarter.

    MCU manufacturers have revealed that this wave of tight production capacity is mainly limited by the tight supply of 8-inch production capacity. Even if wafer foundries begin to increase investment to expand production capacity, it will not be in place until 2022 at the earliest, and the newly added 8-inch production capacity will not be fully supplied to the MCU market. There are also product lines such as power management ICs and logic ICs that need to be distributed, making it difficult to change the shortage of MCU in the short term.

    In addition to insufficient production capacity at the wafer level, semiconductor packaging and testing capacity continues to be in short supply.

    The IC design industry revealed that it is currently believed that the packaging capacity of controllers (MCU) is the most tight, with the minimum order quantity increasing fivefold from the beginning of the year to the near future, resulting in the largest increase in MCU packaging this season, reaching 15%.

    IC design industry analysis shows that MCU covers a variety of applications, and the current supply shortage situation is more severe than at the beginning of the year, synchronously driving up the price of microcontroller packaging again in the second half of the year.

    From the overall packaging testing quotation, MCU packaging saw the largest increase in the third quarter, with a price increase of about 15% and a testing increase of about 15%