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Samsung, TSMC Spending to Dominate Advanced IC Technology Nodes
IC Insights expects Samsung and TSMC's capital expenditures will reach at least $55.5 billion this year and represent an all-time high percentage of total semiconductor industry outlays held by the top two spenders.
www.eetasia.com, Mar. 19, 2021 –
Keeping up with producing leading-edge IC technology has become increasingly expensive over the past 25 years. The investment required to implement the most advanced process technologies for logic devices has now driven out all but three companies–Samsung, TSMC, and Intel–from the leading edge portion of the market. Moreover, of these three manufacturers, only two can truly be considered to be at the leading edge (Samsung and TSMC), with both in volume production of 7nm and 5nm ICs. In contrast, Intel is not expected to be in high volume production of 7nm devices, in its own fabrication facilities, until 2022, at which time Samsung and TSMC are forecast to be producing commercial quantities of ICs using 3nm process technologies.
Historically, the IC companies that had the highest level of capital expenditures were also the companies that were able to produce the most advanced devices. Although Intel has been among the top two leading semiconductor industry capital spenders for 25 out of the past 27 years (Figure 1), the company spent only about half of what Samsung spent in 2020 and is expected to once again fall far short of what both Samsung and TSMC are expected to spend this year (about $28 billion each).
Samsung first spent more than $10.0 billion in semiconductor capex in 2010. After spending $11.3 billion in semiconductor capex in 2016, Samsung's 2017 outlays for the semiconductor group more than doubled to $24.2 billion.
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