Pioneer Electronics News Weekly -- Electronics Industry Review for Week 13, 2023 for your reference.

1. IGBT is out of stock, and some manufacturers have raised prices by 10%.?The semiconductor business is down, and the chip industry is generally facing pressure from customers to cut orders and quote revisions. The demand for IGBTs in the two mainstream applications of electric vehicles and solar energy is booming, and there is a frenzied rush for goods. The recent shortage of IGBTs has promoted the growth of diode factories and foundries. The value of Mosilicon and Han Lei has risen accordingly. Among them,?Han Lei holds a large order from Infineon, the leader of IGBT chip components, and raised the OEM price of IGBT production lines by about 10% at the beginning of this year. Qiangmao is more active in creating IGBT components developed by Taiwan, China, and locking in the upsurge of solar energy and other applications. Ye Zhengxian, chairman of solar cell manufacturer Motech, talked about the phenomenon of IGBT shortages. He said bluntly: "The price increase is not a new thing. It is not a question of how high the price is, but it is simply not available." Continue for a while.

2. IC design terminal demand has not recovered significantly.?Some people in the industry admitted frankly that although the price decline of chips has converged and the average cost has gradually decreased,?short-term and urgent orders are still the mainstay at present, and market demand has not really returned.?Some insiders in the driver IC industry estimate that it is not easy to make more money in the first half of this year; some insiders in the power management IC industry expect that they may have to wait for new products to be launched in the second half of the year if they want to improve their operations significantly.

3. Migration of resources in the mobile phone CIS supply chain. Low-end car-spec products may fall into a price war.?The mobile phone supply chain continues to face inventory adjustment pressure. The CMOS sensor (CIS) wafer reorganization industry said that major mobile phone CIS manufacturers including Sony, Samsung Electronics, and OmniVision are still cooperating with customers to adjust their pace. It is estimated that it will not be until the third quarter at the earliest Chance to recover. The packaging industry said frankly that high-pixel and large-size CIS products are packaged in BGA, and the demand for automotive CIS in the ADAS field is still stable; however, there has been an oversupply of low-end and mid-range automotive CIS products in WLCSP packages, and there is price pressure.

4. The supply of Nvidia GPUs is obviously in short supply, and the visibility of orders has reached 2024.?As the demand for generative artificial intelligence takes off, the demand for semiconductor chips related to AI computing has grown simultaneously. Due to the surge in demand, Nvidia's GPU supply is clearly in short supply, as is the supply of Broadcom and Nvidia's networking equipment. People in the semiconductor industry said that because many companies are extremely anxious about the ChatGPT wave, the demand for high-computing GPUs has soared rapidly. Microsoft and other companies have strong demand for A100/H100 chips, which has led Nvidia to urgently pursue orders with TSMC. The visibility of Nvidia's orders has reached 2024, and its AI GPUs have all placed orders with TSMC.

5. OpenAI quietly entered chip manufacturing.?According to foreign media reports, OpenAI, a star AI product developer such as ChatGPT, is actively seeking a position in the entire industry chain. Since last year, it has invested in more than a dozen early-stage AI startups. According to media analysis, most of the invested companies are developing application tools for generative artificial intelligence models. Examples include a business note-taking app (Mem) and a family calendar manager (Milo), as well as Harvey, a legal assistant, and Kick, an accounting automation platform that leverages open AI models. It is particularly worth noting that?OpenAI is also currently involved in the financing of Atomic Semi, a start-up in the field of chip manufacturing.?The company was founded by microelectronics geek Sam Zeloof and well-known chip architect Jim Keller. "Radical" simplification and miniaturization of semiconductor factories and prototype integrated circuits to produce "more affordable" chips in hours rather than the usual time frame of months.

6. South Korea's chip exports in the first 20 days of March fell 44.7% year-on-year.?According to data from the Korea Customs Service, due to the weak global demand for semiconductors, the decline in exports continued to intensify. In the first 20 days of March, South Korea’s exports fell by 17.4% year-on-year, of which chip exports were US$4.32 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 44.7%. Exports to China fell by 36.2%.

7. It is expected that semiconductor equipment spending will return to the 90 billion mark in 2024.?According to the latest SEMI report, affected by weak chip demand and increased inventory of consumers and mobile devices, the total global front-end fab equipment spending in 2023 is expected to decline by 22% from a record US$98 billion in 2022 to US$76 billion. ;?In 2024, it will rebound by 21% to 92 billion US dollars, returning to the 90 billion mark.?SEMI said that the capital expenditure of the semiconductor industry in 2023 will be adjusted for the correction of chip inventory, but the long-term demand for semiconductors in high-performance computing (HPC) and the automotive sector will continue to be bullish, which is expected to drive the recovery of fab equipment spending next year.

8. Arm may change its pricing strategy.?Arm is looking to raise prices on its chip designs, aiming to boost revenue ahead of this year's highly anticipated initial public offering in New York, the Financial Times reported. Arm, which designs semiconductors for more than 95 percent of smartphones, has recently notified several of its largest customers of a fundamental shift in its business model, according to several industry executives and former employees.?Arm plans to stop charging chipmakers royalties for using its designs based on the value of the chip and instead charge device makers based on the value of the end device, the people said. That should mean the company makes several times more money for every design it sells, since regular smartphones are much more expensive than chips.?Arm has previously licensed its designs to various chipmakers for use in semiconductors in smartphones, computers and cars. It charges a licensing fee for the design and then collects a royalty on each chip shipped. Under Arm's proposed new business model, royalties will be set based on the average selling price (ASP) of mobile devices rather than the average selling price of chips. These changes will primarily involve Arm's most famous "Cortex-A" design.

(The sources of the above information are collected and sorted out from public website news.)